now we need a motion to go in a closed session for the appointment employment compensation discipline performance or dismissal of specific employees specific individuals who serve as independent contractors in a park recreational or educational setting or specific volunteers of the district or legal counsel for the district including hearing testimony of a complaint lodged against an employee a specific individual who serves as an independent contractor in a park recreation or educational setting or a volunteer of the district or against legal counsel for the district to determine its validity so moved second terry and mike thank you terry pavich aye mike davenport aye christopher espinoza aye shirelle fuller aye jenny hagstrom aye nancy kupko aye we are moving into closed session we will be returning into open to adjourn but no action will be taken so for our students thank you you're free to leave thank you thank you thank you scarlett we're going to have a very very fast yes closed session you know how to get out without you guys board members were back in the you're back in the same room you were in the last time i looked like our videographer was trying to get your attention thank you no we're not going to take any action we're just going to adjourn and open you are relieved for the evening thank you so much you
now anecdotally i have seen literally and i i've been using it the right way i have literally seen double the amount of suicide attempts in my picu and all the other nurse will attest to that most of those they said it was because of the loss of control the loss of hope that they had regarding covid now contributing to that was every day having to wear a mask thinking it's never going to end suicide attempts in teens nationwide are on average up 50 percent so it's possible possible that out of an abundance of caution we have killed more children than co through suicide then covet has variants very scare people right the delta variant everyone's worried about that viruses are very smart they want to live they don't want to kill their host the host dies the virus dies scott can you start the route yep please almost done thank you so as the virus evolves yeah it becomes more transmissible but it becomes less lethal they don't tell you that in the media though lastly the cdc is not a government agency guidelines is just another word for suggestion are any of you double masking like fauci said foxy also once said that hiv could be caught on a kitchen counter so please don't make it political don't make it emotional check your heart check your biases use sound rational logical mind to base your decisions on thank you thanks scott next we have uh scott holman schleicher hi my name is abigail schlecker and i'm going into fifth grade at country trails country trails has been my home since kindergarten knowing that at the end of this year i will have to walk through the doors of country trails for a final time makes me so sad leaving behind so many memories but it makes me even more sad that to think about how far i've been i need to look back to remember when things were normal i used to walk through the halls and recognize my friends smiling faces i used to love school my teachers when i got to see my parents for our class parties and mystery readers i used to love literacy nights and color run and field trips i looked forward to lunch every day so i could talk to my friends and play and eat and get daily jokes from my mom that pac for that my mom packs me for now the reason i look forward to lunch is so i can take off my mask and finally breathe all day when i should be thinking about math and science in my head i'm thinking about i cannot breathe and when is this day gonna end one of my favorite things to do each year was the daddy daughter dance when i look back i remember getting all dressed up and wearing flowers and looking up at my dad and dancing to our favorite songs with our my with my feet on top of his at the age of seven years old top at and being seven years old and in second grade i thought i would be able to have many more of these memories with my dad i never would have thought that i would be the last that it would be the last daddy-daughter dance ever because of covid when all of this was starting we used to wonder if an event or a party or a celebration would ever happen again we were disappointed at times i can't go through any more disappointment so i just set my expectations really low and that is sad i wonder every day when things will get back to normal i wonder if they will ever be normal again i feel like they are there are so many grown-ups making decisions for me but they they are not grown-ups that i know or trust it's politicians and all of you in the room that i don't that you don't know me making decisions for me you've never seen me before but i think that you should hear me and you better remember me as abigail schleicher because i am not just a student in the district i am a person and i want decisions to be made by people that i know and trust like my parents thank you for listening thanks abby uh next move jen slicker sorry hi everyone my name is jen schleicher and i have a second grader and a fifth grader at country trails elementary right now i'm appealing to the school board and administrators but i am especially appealing to you dr nolan you more than anyone in this room understand as a father and a child psychiatrist the toll that this is taking on the mental health of children that's probably why your wait list is over a year long ask me how i know i appreciate that more than ever children are battling anxiety and depression loneliness and stress and the number of suicides among children is skyrocketing their mental health needs to be as much of a priority as their physical health the masks are aggravating my daughter's asthma and anxiety she constantly has panic attacks from feeling like she can't breathe my seven-year-old son who has adhd and is on the autism spectrum has a harder time paying attention in class because his glasses keep fogging up and the mask and the shield are distracting him so many children are going to take years to overcome the deficits both emotionally and educationally that this last 492 days since their last normal school day have left them with 492 days i keep a tally on my wall i remember when i was on one of the committees to get kids to go back to school safely it took tons of work and time from everyone involved but i remember being so proud of our district for getting as many of the kids physically into school as possible when other neighboring districts took the easy way out and went full remote my children have been robbed of so many experiences so many joys in their life have been replaced with fear unreasonable fear of fellow students and germs and an illness that has and will have very little direct effect on their health statistically speaking now added in they have fear over what people think of them or how people will judge them for wearing a mask or not wearing a mask i thought we were supposed to teach them to say no to peer pressure you board members and administrators in this room have the power to make this stop after having so much of our children's childhood stolen and having so many of our rights as parents stolen you have the opportunity to take a stand and fight back you always tell us in iep meetings and at school parent-teacher conferences that parents and educators are a team take a stand and allow parents to be involved in their children's lives and health it is not a good precedent to set to let other people start making critical decisions for our children where is the line when does it stop it's not like you are putting a ban on masks entirely but you are putting the decision back into the hands of families if people choose to send their kids to school with masks that's fine it's their children and it should be their choice thank you [Applause] thanks john next we have kim cowell good evening these are some hard speeches to follow everybody's doing such an amazing job but i also did want to share my concerns as well for this upcoming year my name is kim kowal i'm a teacher for school district u46 and i have two kids in district 301 i'm speaking today to share my family's viewpoint on wearing mass next year i also wanted to thank you for all that you did last year to get our students in person it was really important for my kids to be able to have that opportunity and i know a lot of kids didn't have that and moving to full time toward the end of the year was really hard i know it was for you guys and i just want to thank you i have no doubt that you have the children in mind and that you're listening i strongly believe families should have the choice to decide to vaccinate their children and if their children should wear masks the facts support this you've heard it all today and you've heard it please make the right choice and allow us to make the important decisions for our kids surely you have seen the studies that show coven 19 poses almost no threat to children and that the risks for getting the vaccine are there as well the vaccine might be the right choice for some people but not others children shouldn't be punished for not needing the vaccine children should not be bribed or coerced into getting the vaccine and parents should make these decisions for their children based on their own needs and circumstances our kids have sacrificed a lot this past year they should not bear that burden anymore i am highly concerned about their health if they need to wear mass all next year in school and in sports i am also highly concerned about the segregation of mass and unmasked children and the effects this will have on their social and mental states this doesn't mean we should mask all students it means we should be allowed to make an informed choice we do not need to force mass on any children as they are very low risk please look at these facts continue listening to your families and make the right choice and allow us to choose these important decisions for our kids thank you thanks kim next to john barham thank you board good evening i know you guys are put in a no-win situation last year and i appreciate what you did for the kids to get them back in school because it made a big difference in my son luke's uh kindergarten year with miss normwell loved every part of it the thing that i had a problem with is when he got his picture he goes oh my gosh dad i've never seen what my friends look like think about that as a parent it irritates me but i also want you to think about where we're at in society i'm not here to speak on my behalf and i really am we the people are here to speak on everybody's behalf in burlington but i'm here to speak on behalf of one of your employees that's afraid to come up and speak because they're afraid they might lose their job if they voice their concern and to me that's tyranny that is something we do not need i want you to think about that an employee that's on your goal is afraid to stand here and they ask me to represent them tonight and i'm going to read what that person has to say the mask prohibits us from effectively implementing verbal communications to the students while i drive their bus they can't hear us they can't see our facial expression plus i must remove my hands from the steering wheel to pull my mask down to speak to them if i can't have a phone in my hand why should i have a mask in my hand when a student is in distress i can't see their facial expression and hear them because of the mask again creates further disruption to the driver while i'm trying to find out what's going on while the bus is in motion with the engine running and the windows open and the hatches open which is mandated also due to covet 19 so it's very loud on the bus in the warm weather it can get above 100 degrees on the bus while children are wearing a mask go to family fitness center wherever you're at put your mask on go on the sign and sit for a couple of minutes and see what it feels like that's what these kids are doing on the bus and that's why this person is making my uh time uh putting her up here to talk about this students do not always recognize their bus driver because of the mask i had an incident where i had to pick up my first student and i didn't have my mask on he walked up to my bus he looked at me he didn't recognize me and started to walk away i had to honk the horn and tell him it was me the fear in his eyes was horrific because of the mask they asked questions like why can i go play with my friend saturday sunday but then i've got to wear a mask when i come back to school on monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday i'm around him i'm playing with them they do plenty of spraying and disinfectant on the bus there's no need for a mask so i implore you as our board of education do the right thing vote on this tonight to make masks optional for all kids in the burlington 301 school district tonight we the people are here we the people will hold you accountable i can promise you that thank you for your time next we have mirror um my name is mary ormond i have three daughters um they attend lily lake but they they attend lilly lake but last year they got to attend 100 remote thank you for that keeping them safe and keeping us safe one of them has cerebral palsy which is a very serious brain disorder she also thank you for bringing up rsv she got rsv when she was five years old not a baby disease she because of her cerebral palsy cannot cough and cannot bring it up and so we spent two weeks in the picu as i watched her hook to a ventilator and i watched her explode like he said and i watched her struggle to breathe and i watched her fight for her life that i had already fought for when she was a preemie born at 30 weeks she wears a mask everywhere anywhere we wear masks to keep her safe to keep her alive to not have to sit and watch her in a picu struggling to breathe again she's seven she started this in kindergarten she's now going into second grade with she wants to go back to school so bad so bad you she's a baby kindergartner that started she loves school every minute of it she loves she loved remote because it was school she loves the teacher she loves the staff she cannot go back to school unmask she can't i can't let her i can't put that on her and i can't wish that other people can see her and pick you struggling to breathe i can't change anyone's mind and i don't plan on that what i plan on doing is telling you she's not the only one in this district who needs to be masked she's not the only one who will end up in the picky with rsv her pediatrician told us last week please please make sure she knows how to take on and off that mask correctly if she's going back to school please let me train her so we spent two hours in his office going over hand washing masks everything so she's prepared to come back to school but i'm scared i'm terrified that if she goes back to school unmasked or if she gets put in a classroom full of people unmasked and she slips up you have a seven-year-old who will go back to the fake you struggle to breathe struggle to cough and struggle to be here after she's fought since 30 weeks to be alive thank you for your time with our freedom that you give us the parents choice if the mask works where's the mask i mean if thank you we do understand that thank you okay next week thank you mary next week with kelly cameron because i'm not a concise speaker okay hi yes i'm kelly cameron um parents to a going to be a seventh grader and a freshman um you know i was going to read can you guys hear me i was going to read different statutes but i'm sure you all are familiar with these and likely all of you are um so the bottom line is that you know at a state or federal level no one can legally impose the masks um so that to be said i find it i don't know ironic that there needs to be a decision made about kids wearing the masks or not um but i'd like to appeal to uh the mental health piece of this so in seventh grade my now we're going to be freshman he has a couple of mental health issues and um i couldn't get him out of bed um the anxiety the depression add spectrum diagnosis i couldn't get him out of the bed um by the grace of god and literally logistically because two teachers happen to live across the street from us he was able to get through the school year if it wasn't for them um i i don't know that he would have been promoted to eighth grade um he is also medicated um but based on what was going on in the world um you know his emotions and then add you can't regulate your emotions he was a mess he was a hot mess and i was hot mess is his mother going forward to eighth grade and um having to wear the mask it was difficult for him to get through a school day um at times he uh he he really did a great job in my opinion of keeping himself together um because of the anxiety and the different things and him having to wear the mask statistically you guys heard this about suicides we've been on a waiting list for a year to get in to see a psychiatrist um that number to me is staggering but now i think it's pumped up jumped up to like a year and a half wait and this is you know in the community a lot of kids are having to see mental health providers because of the emotional effects of the masking i'm not sure what i what else i had with that so um i mean to me the the logic of it is if the government is not enforcing this and isbe and the illinois department of health and the governor has kind of like let school boards decide um and the science is there to disprove mass preventing covet then why why i mean the question of damask or not mask to me it's obvious but maybe not um i'm all for people parents parents being able to make the decisions about their children's bodies and well-being so let parents decide to mask or not mask thank you and thank you i know this has been a crazy year for all of you and i appreciate your perseverance in trying to get things you know right for the school year last school year and thank you thank you [Applause] thank you kelly and uh last is aaron all right well stuffy you again for all of your comments um we actually as a board haven't had an opportunity to discuss this together yet so you guys are uh ahead of the curve here so i do want to i do want to say something by the way um so uh again eric nolan somebody referenced me i i know some of you personally um a couple of the sisters that left i grew up with on the side of elgin in the mid 80s that they left so like i know a lot of people in here and i i really i really want to say i appreciate the fact that this did not devolve into drama and throwing things and screaming because i'm sure everybody has seen videos of something like that so i truly appreciate that as somebody who's on this side and i think uh you know at times it can be perceived as this us versus them thing which is certainly not the case for those that know me and hopefully you believe that everybody's up here whether it's our uh our support staff over here it is our superintendent assistant superintendent or the other people on the board we really are truly here to do our best so thank you for at least acknowledging that this has not been easy for us it's not easy for me as a parent it's not easy for me as a child psychiatrist it's not been easy for me as a community member to see people in my neighborhood and the people i care about struggling in different ways so i do want to say thank you and to the two kids that spoke fantastic jobs i really appreciate [Applause] counts that we will move on to our action items we need a motion second to discuss and approve the consent agenda so moved thank you revenue and expenditure summary reports are included in your board packet revenues are currently at 108 0.24 compared to 98.83 a year ago expenditures are at 95.90 compared to 98.69 a year ago these percentages are pre-audited figures and they might change slightly after we do the audit this past month we received impact fees of 142 895.33 for 22 home starts uh transition fees came in at twenty nine thousand four hundred and twenty five dollars and four cents this month total impact fees coming in for fy21 came in over budget at one million four hundred and sixty seven thousand five hundred ninety six dollars and forty eight cents of the six hundred and seventy five thousand dollar budget uh transition fees that go into the ed fund also came in over budget at a hundred and eighty six thousand five hundred and twenty one dollars and thirty cents of the 80 000 budget bills payable reports are typical for there's a final june payment that we do um to wrap up as much june as we can and for the month of july you'll see our bus leases in there there's chromebooks tuition those are some of the big big ones and then we'll need to schedule a special board meeting to go over the tentative budget like we always do um so you guys can discuss it in closed session and find a date and then we're also preparing for our annual audit that is scheduled to start uh august 9th as well thanks dude any questions oh yes nolan yep yes yes next motion secondary needed to discuss and approve the microsoft textbooks materials the memo was in your packet last month for information we took questions there it's been on display any additional questions for me yes next we need motion and second to discuss and approve the tentative budget for the northern keene regional vocational system second so tonight i'm presenting that by 22 budget for northern kane i'm asking you to firmly approve the sum of the budget it's been on display since friday so it'll make its 30-day public notice and also went in the daily herald um and then at the next board meeting august 16th we'll do the final budget okay so just to recap just for the few new board members that are here northern king county regional vocational system we also call it the efe-110 so if you hear those two words like kind of meaning the same thing it consists of four different school districts kane county u-46 district 300 us and district 303 the program kind of brings more class offerings and opportunities for all students and allows us to collaborate our efforts together and use our resources more effectively within all these schools this slide shows a bunch of examples of cte programs that we currently have offered at different schools this year they're kind of trying to focus more on strengthening and enhancing these current programs that we have which of these are housed with us so we have well we have our animal sciences science really for the regional programs or for the overall programs for the overall programs the overall programs we have a business strand we have a technology strand can you go back so we have accounting we have agricultural science we have business computer programming we have some drafting educational technology marketing video production and we also they don't have on here but we have a business strand and incubator all right okay uh regional programs that are offered are listed here the ag vet is housed at central high school and then automotive at south elgin high school precision manufacturing is at two high school south elgin new hampshire welding is at two schools as well elgin high school in hampshire and then coming in the fall of 23 is their projection is to do the allied health care which is like a certified nursing assistant program and then the educator pathway would be for students that want to go into like early childhood or become secondary elementary or secondary teachers does cainlyn have a version of that now because they have an in-house daycare on property for staff there not anymore oh they don't is it is was last year the first year they didn't do it right okay so they did have some version of that yeah that's gone okay so funding sources there's four grants perkins five and ctei are annual grants that we've always had we did get two new grants awarded which are the cte career exploration grant and the career pathway grant perkins five is a federal grant and it's calculated based on the number of students enrolled plus the number of students in poverty at each school the cti incentive grant is based on the state grant and it's calculated based on the number of programs or courses being offered in the district and the number of students that complete one or more of these programs the career exploration grant is a one-time grant that we were awarded and it will be used to compensate students for internships participating in work based learning experiences so we will pay the business partner that hosts these students when they go and do their internships and then the cte career pathway grant is a four-year grant that is kind of it will be used to expand the education educator pathways in district 300 and u46 so this is revenues and expenditures projected out for fy22 since we're cash basis we record our receipts when they're received by the state and then we record our expenditures when the checks are actually cut so some schools might expend something but we may not reimburse until the following month until and i don't record it until it's actually cut um so that's why there's this big discrepancy on the fund balance and where it kind of looks so the unaudited beginning fund balance is 1.527 million and it's just due to the timing of receipts so the state was actually keeping up with their payments for the cte program that they were paying for it before we were getting all of the expenditures from the other districts so as for an easy example if you look at the under revenues the cti career exploration grant it shows zero revenue there because it's already sitting in the 1.5 million fund balance at the top we got that money the very end of june but we didn't have time to spend it until this coming school year so then you'll see it down in the expenditures there's 50 000 that will be spent and then when it's all said and done if all of this holds true we'll be back down to the 6 30 that we started um so this slide shows you just the cti grant allotment um you can see from fy 21 to 22 there was a slight increase and then the details if you want to see more details of all of this it's included in the budget that's in your board packet on pages four to six um i think it was about sixty eight thousand dollars that it went up and then the only major change or minor change in this is that we are adding a um an assistant position here um so we're going to split it 70 will be covered by northern kane 30 percent of the salary and benefits will be covered by central and this position is going to do some grant writing it's going to do some expenditure revenue tracking for us compliance with state requirements for externships um assisting in the mtss and all of whatever else it comes up with but those are some big big things that they're going to be doing and then this is the perkins 5 grant allotment not much change here either this one went down a little bit i think it was about four thousand dollars decrease from twenty one to twenty two um and that the salary that i was just talking about will be split between both my brand so and that's all i have were there any surprises in here in the budget for you guys no no we we did i mean it took us a while to get going on it um we were cutting the checks and balancing and stuff like that but just yeah just getting the whole process set up okay thanks dude affiliation agreements so much second candy chicken let me take it uh the affiliation agreement i'm sorry those are the veterinary sciences that we always do the program sorry we have four additional veterinary sciences that have signed on for us next year we did receive a lot of um really positive um comments from our vet programs that we worked with this year they're very happy with the students that were coming from our program and what they could offer to them and the services that were able to provide those veterinary programs so we do have four additional ones signing on i think we're at our all-time high which is really great to see that all of our veterinary clinics across the region are really signing up and we're starting to have a name for quality students coming to their to their facilities to assist so looking for approval for our agreements so what the second one is yes all right that concludes our action challenge we're going to go on information items uh dr stern and dr mongan who will update us on the back to school as president gorman mentioned earlier this will really be the first um discussion on the new guidance that the board has had and so i'm going to give an overview a board can add into discussion at that point so big change that occurred in may 19 may 19th of of this year that's when isb came out with their declaration that they were preparing for a full return to in-person learning that the remote learning was going away and that the goal was to have all students in school to the greatest extent possible that was that first indication at that time uh it was kind of unclear what was going to happen with the other guidance because we had we had concerns as school leaders and our weekly meetings with the king county health department and with other superintendents that under the current under the previous mitigation factors it would be near impossible for us to get the kids to school uh if you were restricted to 50 students on a bus um some of those other things such as social distancing uh requested that social distancing be aligned uh with the three feet with the three foot guidelines and then we're waiting for that guidance to come out and we're waiting for the guns to come out and every week we asked when we were going to be receiving that guidance um we were all surprised when that guidance was released on on friday july 9th because we did not have any previous correspondence or knowledge that it was going to be released at that point so we've spent some time looking at the cdc guidance when the cdc guidance was released very quickly which was atypical for online very quickly ivph um and and isb supported that guidance accepted it in full uh the cdc guidance in full people who have emailed the board myself they are correct and that um the cdc has given local control uh the state's given local control and discretion to school boards but that's not in and of itself complete because the discretion is given to local school boards but notes that any decisions about prevention strategy should be metric driven and made in consultation with local health officials so there there's that caveat to it some good news for us is that capacity limits have been removed for school spaces so our capacity limits are gone and for school buses capacity limits are gone although i will tell you that under the the new guidance masking on school buses is still required it's not even a recommendation it falls under the public transportation guides which is in effect until mid-september so um in consultation with the health department others it's important to know that the guidance that masking is required on public transportation including our school buses but the capacity limit for school buses um has been increased to 71 so we can we can put our students on the bus capacity limits for gymnasiums limitations for cafeteria have all been lifted uh so under the guidelines we have full use of our cafeteria we have full use of our gymnasiums and the plan at because of that the plan especially the middle school in high school would be we'd go back to using our designated cafeteria areas and we will no longer spread out elementary schools will use their cafeterias middle schools will use a cafeteria the high school will use their cafeteria students will return to cubby use students will return to locker use so um under the new guidance that is oil presumably at the elementary school level same that 25 28 whatever that back to our pre covid schedule if you will correct so as we look at some of our metric data then as we look at our data um as a school district and as a county we know that uh for king county over 70 percent of eligible people to receive the vaccine has ever at least received one dose today i learned in my meeting with the health department that 42 of uh individuals in kent county 12 to 17 now are fully vaccinated for king county health department statistics then when we look at our own school district on metrics i can tell you that the practices that we did have in place last year and people being responsible we really had a very low overall incident rate and i think that's something that everyone should be commended on last year we had 260 students um that tested positive for cloven 19.
and this is that slide i added last time just again to highlight what are we spending the operating reference money on what are we getting for those dollars that that we worked so hard to get and that the public was very supportive of and basically during this first six months of this year 490 teachers made about 3 600 more in salary because of that because of the operating referendum and just under a thousand support staff made an average of uh almost 700 more during that period of time and then we have this time we hadn't done this yet in the first quarter but we did spend the entire hundred fifty thousand dollars towards our school resource officers and four hundred thousand dollars to update the bus fleet and so those are the safety security side of the operating referendum and then just uh again to highlight um basically we spent seven over seven percent more on salaries and salary related benefits for our employees because of the operating referent and then on uh the month end balances just like to show this to you and it highlights also the the the health fund which is important the health and dental fund but education is again tracking at the similar rate but we borrowed less and so that's the gap between the prior year and the in the current year operations fund is the same way it's tracking the same way that it did last year with the gap for the lower um the lower tax anticipation warrant um the operating referendum fund we collected property tax distributions in may and june and so we finally got into positive territory on that more than what we owe in the temporary uh tax anticipation warrants that we borrowed in january and then health and dental continues to be on a positive trend um as we made some corrections there and and the health and dental does include those balances do include the transfer that's in the request for your approval this evening any questions on the quarter two financial report questions yes yes thank you remind me so this uh chart the one on the bottom left uh operating referendum fund there was a balance at the beginning of how when did the first dollars come into the operating referendum fund for us what's the relationship between a taxpayer making property tax payments and in funding this referendum fund good question i should have done the same thing um in january that i did at the end of december because at the end of december the the white line is that ticks temporary tax anticipation warrant i should have put it down to zero at the beginning of january because we had started january 1 with zero borrowed money on those temporary tax anticipation warrants we do every year until we started collecting property taxes in may and june so we got one early distribution in may we ask the county every year to give us uh 80 of what they've collected to that point in time because they're just collecting interest on it instead of us at that point and of course people pay their if they're on escrow you know they're paying throughout the course of the year so in may we always ask them to give us an early distribution so the first dollars came into the operating referendum fund in may from property taxpayers than the rest at the end of june thank you the same thing will happen november december this year and then we'll pay the tax anticipation warrants back are there other questions all right thank you very much and dr shed i'm just going to preface um mr funk's presentation really quickly while i'm up here and kind of transition um just to set the stage for as you're looking at the myriad of needs that we have for uh our facilities and the number of acres that we have under roof in our district um we do and mr funk will be pointing out the funding sources for each of these but i just want to give a little bit of background really quickly before he and dr bozeman come up the three different funding for sources for tonight's projects are a lot of the hvac work is going to be done with federal stimulus money that was one of the main points of emphasis for that most recent esser or cair's act of dollars was that you could improve air quality in buildings and so that's that's one of the big expenditures and so that's federal dollars on the uh athletic baseball and softball projects this one is one that again the new board members might not be as familiar with but back in 2010 after the um after the great recession when the the stimulus package at that point time came out we were already doing our big you know 90 million dollar 89 million dollar renovation at our high schools well the federal government came out and said if you do a big project and do a public infrastructure project the interest you pay on bonds we will give back to you in a rebate after you make those payments and so we did that from 2010 through 2018 when we refinanced that bond for a much lower interest rate and it was to our financial advantage to stop getting the rebates and start getting paying the lower interest rate so but that ended the rebates but there was still 2.9 million dollars left in build america bond dollars is what they were we call them bab dollars around the office you'll hear the term bab even with the board members i think you've heard that before and i think mr funk refers to that way so those are those are dollars that we decided to put towards the high school facility projects just to do some of the things that didn't get included didn't get included in the original 89 million dollars and then the third part is as we always do the the larger facility improvement project at um at parkside will be paid for with bonds that are timed with when current debt rolls off to keep the tax rate flat so any there's no approval for you tonight that'll come later in the next few meetings and i apologize for all the hearings that we will have to do then because there's a lot as we refinance the central project and issue new bonds for the project for parkside but i wanted you to be familiar with those three funding sources that's a nice preview and does keep the blood pressure down just a tad so thank you for that all right need we have an introduction good evening dr roberts and and board members since we're starting with sharing tucker stories tucker as part of a senior project i was approached that the the shot put pit careful i say that was not large enough for tucker so we as part of a senior project they expanded that which i hadn't realized that was a need until i saw him throw and realized it was not big enough because he was throwing outside of the ring so i'm not going to cover that here tonight but since we're all opening with with stories of tucker or mentions at least i appreciate the time tonight uh we'll try to keep things as brief as possible we do have a lot of things to cover um jim funk with cso and brad here with us as well um it may we may have three board members that are new to us since jim has been here to present last so um so jim funk has been with us well before i was in this role he knows more about our buildings than i do each every four years we do a facility master plan update to where cso comes in and really does an in-depth uh dive and review of our current state of our facilities hvac pavement improvements basically everything that is under our umbrella and um gives us some data to share with you all which which is uh if you've been here you're familiar with that and then recommendations on on things we should focus on in the future so we've done that for for several years now 2016 most recently and then we were a little bit delayed getting that out it was a little harder to get into buildings and meet the principals and of the such but but mr funk's going to lead us through that master plan update for your review and then we'll talk about potential 21 projects coming up thank you dr bozeman president shad dr roberts board thank you it's been a little while since i've been here 2016 with our our last time we did this and did it before that in 2011 and then all the way back as far as 2005 so you'll see something here familiar if for four of you for three of you'll see something that you've not seen before but uh just to talk a little bit about what's happened since 2016 a big push on security across the district so a lot of effort spent putting lockable door hardware on all the classrooms um securing outside the buildings new camera systems really bringing a whole new level of security across inside and outside buildings along with new procedures for that and then playgrounds we hit every playground at elementary schools brought them all into ada compliance with new and safe structures and play surfaces and then at both high schools we did a little bit of work um the turf fields were both in need of replacements both those that were replaced uh the bleachers at east were replaced as well as both auditoriums saw some improvements and then um transportation maintenance building one of those long kind of overdue projects um received a good bit of work to expand a lot so you can fit in outfits more buses and all the buses i believe can fit there um and then a little addition on to the the building and a lot of work on the exterior a new roof uh completely new exterior to put insulation the building actually didn't have insulation before on the original part so that looks a lot different now and i think functions a lot better and then a new soccer complex out north of parkside so that's a little delayed and getting done due to covid with some delays and materials and things but i think now pretty much complete um and then some additional things that happen with uh roofs a lot of roofs and think about number of roofs in your building you almost need to do one or two a year to keep up with your 18 school buildings and then your other accessory buildings and then just boilers and chillers and things like that that only last so long and you need to keep your schools operating so so a couple new focus areas that really dr bozeman brought on and you've probably seen most of these is one of the sustainable energy management program it really puts a goal on each building as to energy usage and what it should be and then seven um guiding values and principles things that were um i love this document i think cabinet came up with this and but it really emphasizes a lot of the qualities you've been doing for years it just was never documented probably the big part of this was the work over the past couple years with all the lighting and interior exterior was replaced with leds and that is a one of the best ways to improve energy at each building that cuts your energy usually by half at least and so as part of this there's an eui score of below 50 that's the target it's getting below 50 for each building these are kind of you see where buildings are at i think these are 2018 data 2019.
297. i believe that's correct 290. consolidation almost 300 and typically center grove has been anywhere from 270 to 275 in the funding formula over the last 10 years uh one other question are you familiar with the work ethic certificate program i'm sorry the what work ethic certificate program i am not it's the governor's work ethic certificate program okay and part of that program goes hand in hand with teaching students skills especially when's graduating right out of high school on how to interview for a job what you need i mean one of the criteria is simply showing up on time for things because unfortunately students don't have those skills in coming from some of our homes so i just wondered if you're not familiar with it i guess they won't really answer the questions because those skills we're teaching in that from the governor go hand in hand with social emotional learning skills so i didn't know if you were familiar with that or not i was not sorry okay thank you it's a great program okay are there any other questions from mr jacob congressman jacob i think she's dropping her phone so unfortunately we have lost mrs counts any other questions just connect thank you for trying to get her back i'm here i'm here yay she she hasn't listened [Applause] yeah mrs counts did you have any questions i do not i'm sorry sometimes like i try to hit the unmute button and it just keeps going up and down so i apologize that's okay and we're having bad weather here so that's probably not helping things uh okay so have we come up with one more speaker yes okay and as always if you state your name and address all right kathy giuliani 5875 north road 400 west and i'm a grandparent in center grove and i am a parent of two children who came to the center grove schools so we've been here for a good long time and have been very happy with center grove schools we've had to punt tonight because we had a presentation that was we had timed it out for 15 minutes obviously we got confused on that so i'm going to just try to paraphrase what we've what we wanted to get across the reason this group formed was because of outrage over what happened at pleasant grove when the counselor went in and did the lesson called windows and doors and just so you know i just want to read one question from that it was about teaching the kids about microaggression these are fifth fifth graders i believe right fifth graders okay so a microaggression might be all lives matter so that's a microaggression because no one denies that that's true but all lives can't matter until black lives matter another one if you didn't commit the crime the police wouldn't have to draw their guns so that of course is assuming that um they are guilty so here's here's the point in this one brief statement you've taught the kids the inappropriate and harmful concept of microaggression you've promoted black lives matter you've disparaged the police you've effectively called the children racist without any thought word or action to support it well done and we had a 10 year old go home how many other 10 year olds went home and were upset but didn't have a parent that called so that's what got this group going so and that's one of my main complaints this these programs what i'm seeing written are not at all age appropriate and i have taught third grade through university uh this is not your traditional character education i would say your traditional character education is like what i used to teach in health class great stuff and what's going to happen after the employability skills are taught that's what we've been told those sound great right but what's after that also we don't know what the plan is for middle school and high school if you want to know where these lesson plans are coming from they are coming from our indiana department of education through a group called castle based out of chicago you should should should go look at their website i want to read you one quote um the funders and growth partners for castle includes an organization called new profit their mission is to seek and disrupt systems of oppression that are the foundation of an equitable opportunity and outcomes for all and the novo foundation they are a social justice foundation dedicated to um catalyzing a transformation in global society from a culture of domination to one of equality is this the best way that we can spend 45 minutes every other week with our kids are our test scores that high that we can spend the time doing this we have we are not unsympathetic to the suicide issue or to other mental health issues definitely not but we're taking a sledgehammer to fix a problem that attack hammer could do and i want to say one thing about the research that you're putting up telling us that this results in academic growth of 11 i read the research what if what i found was uh in the meta-analysis only 16 of all of the studies in the meta-analysis even reported on academic gains 16 so i'm going to tell you that 11 is not only statistically weak it's also deceptive this is giuliani this is giuliani do we have any questions for mrs giuliani anyone okay thank you did you yeah well not really a question just kathy i appreciate coming in and taking the time to do that and and uh representing these people these fine young folks here um you know you brought up that presentation and i was pretty upset with it as well um i mean i was actually really upset and i don't think you'd find a person on this board that was happy with it to be honest with you um i don't want to speak for everybody but i mean it was it was something that we all were pretty upset about and i know what left a black eye in the community's eyes and i know we lost trust in you guys the school district did and um and then all we're doing is trying to um kind of create some guardrails maybe i think of the last board meeting doctor arghanov said he was going to create guardrails to maybe prevent these things from happening again or when they do we can hold people accountable appropriately so to speak and uh so i appreciate it i appreciate you taking the time to be here and i know you guys put a lot of time into giving a bigger presentation um and i apologize that that was not allowed thank you any other questions thank you mr harper thank you mr giuliani and thank all of you for being patient through some misinformation whatever we want to call it there i think tonight we saw some seotl things with collaboration with each other and these are skills we learn our next order of business is consent items do i have a motion to approve the consent items mr president i move that we approve the consent agenda as presented thank you mr alexander do i have a second second thank you mr daniels as before i have to go down through the roll call amy you look like you're in a home and we will start with mrs counts everyone wave miss accounts uh yay or nay on approval of the consent items yay you're multitasking you're driving aren't you mr daniels yay mr alexander and mr hubbard i'm a yay you're negative yay yay okay and myself yay celeste passes 5-0 thank you all now we will move down to action items and the 8.1 is the uh to approve the 2021-2022 return to school plan which was presented earlier i have a motion on that from a board member mr russell i move that we approve the return to school plan for 2021 2022 school year as presented thank you mr daniels do i have a second i will say go ahead mr alexander i'll second it so we can have to discuss so we can have the discussion okay we have a first and a second are there any questions or discussions i i think for me it's just it's more of a it's more of a comment or um you know on on one hand you know the governor issued an executive order kind of you know mr jacobs is saying they want the local local government to have more control so the governor issues an executive order and we find out an hour before the meeting that that isn't true because of i whatever code around having to quarantine and and those types of things so i think there's a definite disconnect somewhere between the governor's office and what's happened and what's happening and the control that the local levels of government has i'm not i like this i like the plan better than the plan that we had to go with last year because last year required masks and all sorts of crazy rules around quarantining and we've had administrators watching video to figure out who should be quarantined and who shouldn't be quarantined and continuing to quarantine healthy kids because they were sitting three feet next to somebody in class i think is quite honestly a waste of our staff's time and energy i think i've stated multiple times through the course of the pandemic that you quarantine for two reasons the hospital the hospitalization rates are going up because we're taxing the hospital system and the death rates going up neither of which are occurring in johnson county or in the state at the moment if i understand the idea or the department of health's website's map here appropriately so corn continuing to quarantine kids in school buildings is something that i i just i find hard to believe we're having to continue to do this year um based on where things currently are um with all that being said we have to have some kind of reopening plan why this plan may not be perfect i will support the plan tonight but i would like for the administration to schedule a special meeting with the board so we can have further discussion about the quarantining rules what does that look like so we have a better understanding of that than what we've had in the past since you know i think the board was on one path until six o'clock this evening and we've we've kind of had to suddenly do uh an about face on where where our open or the 2021 2022 reopening plan is and and here's the other thing i mean this is constantly evolving i applaud the efforts of mrs norman and and mr taylor i i can't believe i can't believe all the hoops and things that these two individuals have had to jump through i'd like to get them back to doing their actual day jobs and not figuring out who was sitting within three feet of somebody or who was too close to somebody at show choir practice or tennis practice or football practice um i'd like for you know maybe we can talk a little bit more about that ic code i you know i i struggle to give dr arkanov direction to knowingly violate uh an ic code so so anyhow just my dissertation about covid can i head real quick because i know some of them are here and they came tonight some of the great principles in the building that are the key to that contact tracing as well sorry so they really do help i i also i guess i want to make a statement is there is pam back there pam can you pull up the slide nine from that presentation is that is that possible because you refer to the indiana administrative code and i just want to give just a little bit of background of kind of what happened today just to put this in context the administrative code tells us that we have to do this it says we have to quarantine these students under these circumstances so i want to start with the positives the positives we've got lower coveted numbers the positives we're going to have in person learning the positives masks are going to be optional all of those things are positives we're going in the right direction let's hope we continue to go in the right direction my colleague scott made reference quite accurate 100 degree that we thought we were going in one direction with spectral quarantines and this morning an announcement came out that oh hey you must follow administrative code as it relates to quarantines i am not going to direct this school or our superintendent to not follow the law and if the law tells us we have to follow this that until they tell us otherwise i've got to vote in favor of this plan that is going to include quarantines i did my kid was quarantined i was quarantined my wife was it wasn't fun it's not fun for anybody nobody wants covet nobody wants any of this stuff but i cannot vote to have the superintendent the school corporation amy jason all those who put all their long hours into doing everything we had to try to keep people safe to try to keep people healthy we violate the law i i just can't do that in good conscience so even though i'm not necessarily happy that we had to make this change as scott said at six o'clock i'm going to support this plan but i do agree also that we need to continue to look at this and can you go to the last slide another thing i really like about this plan i went through the numbers are down in person learning maths are optional but look at the last major bullet point dr harkinoff will be given authority to adjust the plan throughout the school year after consultation with the board and administration the first sub-bullet under that says changes may be made based on increased or let's hope decrease spread in our school and our community so stay tuned well i'm going to vote tonight for this that doesn't mean this is the end-all be-all and this is going to be what the rules are the entire year let's hope the spread slows down let's hope the spread stops for for goodness sake so don't think that my vote today is necessarily thinking that the quarantine rule that we've been mandated to follow is a good idea but it's the idea we're being told we have to follow so thank you mr albert anything yeah i just you know i want to kind of second what they said and thank you jason and amy for the hard work he has put into this and um it kind of sucks that this kind of came down at the 11th hour from the state um you know but with that being said i'm kind of i just i'm ready for the principles to get back to doing their jobs and ready for you guys to get back to your doing your jobs and for this to kind of come down like this i think it's a slap in the face to the school district i know there's other schools in the state that are basically thumb on their nose um at that and so i'm gonna i'm gonna vote no i don't know where everybody else stands but i'm voting no i think thank you mr hubbard hey joe i'm not personally offended either mrs counts do you have any comments so i you know i think maybe everybody on the board spoke the surprise that we got this morning i think that you know i think that was a surprise to all of us i i personally the state and find the disconnect between the governor's office and our in our health department okay okay thank you mrs counts uh as all the comments lean towards as i said earlier we are charged with dealing with the federal the state and the county all three of them don't decide to hold hands a whole lot of times and that's what gets us into this mess in this last minute situation as mr daniels said i think you alluded within a week it could all change but we have to start with something and move from that point so we have where we are so the administration can also know what their marching orders are so with nothing more to add can we try and get that additional conversation scheduled before they start school absolutely i'll work with pam we'll get a we'll get a calendar out to i know they're trying to get five of us in the same place at the same time as a challenge but herd and cats so and i'm sure because the information that will come down to us we will have to have that meeting on that absolutely and as you know from last year um you know it changed a change of change i don't think that uh that's going to be different this year it's my guess between now and august 5th there's going to be three more changes that occur so yeah let's hope yeah hopefully for the better hopefully for that yeah we'll see if it's that long okay if there's no further comments we do need to vote on this i've had it first by mr daniels in a second by mr alexander mr daniels how do you vote i vote in favor hey mr alexander yay mr hubbard nay mrs counts i think she already told us she'll get it she has to say it again mrs counts you can write it up her name she said maybe she was wrong i'll go ahead i am a gay mrs counts your vote on this gotta love technology she's nice thank you motion passes three to two thank you board great discussion next order of business on action items is to approve the 2021-2022 student handbook dr arkana thank you mr russell see this evening i'm recommending that the board approve the changes to the 2022 elementary and secondary student handbooks as presented and uh dr long will provide you with some additional information thank you about cramped up after walking up here i've been sitting so long so sorry i'm a little slow getting up here dr long i'm going to stand don't take it first one feel free if anybody else would like to stand up this is not the most exciting part of the night obviously but tonight we bring to the board the handbooks for the elementary the middle school and the high school the one thing that i would say is our mask policy uh or we called it our face covering policy that was in the the handbook last year we modified that so it matches what the board approved tonight and it just says that the school corporation will follow the requirements provided by the indiana department of health if the indiana department of health does not mandate mask center grove community school corporation will not require mask however parents and students may choose to wear a mask if they desire so that's a change in all three of the handbooks so rather than have that individually three times i wanted to make sure we covered that um if you want which one do you have first pam do you want it okay so on the elementary handbook first of all i'd like to acknowledge krista nelson she's the principal at center grove elementary she totally dismantled the elementary handbook and then put it all back together it's probably been 10 to 12 years since we've really done that made it in line with the high school and middle school so she did a really great job got input from mrs phillips mr seiner mr kelly mr rod our mrs rodman and mr proctor so they've done a really nice job and i'm really proud of the way this handbook looks and next year mrs nelson is going to help the middle schools do the same thing so we get those in line as well so she did such a good job she got drafted again some of the new changes highlighted for the elementary school it was a way to pick up our the way to report in absences and pick up patrol so we wanted to make sure we had that probably the biggest um change in our uh in the handbook is under our attendance policy it's an updated attendance policy on national competitions so it reads that participation in a non-school sponsored state or national competition a student who competes in a non-school sponsored state or national competition will be marked as an unexcused absence we did a lot of research on this that's in line with probably almost 90 percent of the other school corporations that we surveyed we think it's important we want students to be actively involved in those but we found this year that some kids miss two days for an event and other kids miss seven days for the same event so we try to try to make this uniform and that again is a a a policy that both the middle our the middle school high school and the elementary school wanted to adopt and to add to their handbook we added a little bit about in the transportation about students taking pictures and videoing other students on on the bus that just aligns more with the the middle and high school policy too and then an update is uh some updated costs the teachers thought it was important for our parents and our students to know uh what it cost if they intentionally damaged technology so mr taylor and his department put that in there and so we added that but those are the the highlights uh i'd be happy to answer any questions um if you have any or do you want me to go go on to the next middle school and we gotta do them as a package sure all right i'll go on middle school hold all your questions till it goes through so um mrs lawson chris griffin jake holder and jeff mendenhall all worked on this and really appreciate their uh their efforts um they i i applaud their effort they addressed three three areas in the dress code for the students i i think they're all in a positive way they added the wording that athletic shorts that provide adequate attic adequate coverage are acceptable that's more and more common you guys know that if you've had children uh the one thing that surprisingly is in here is that blankets are carrying a blanket at school is no long not necessary and against policy i thought that would be in the elementary one but that's a middle school one they won't wear a coat but they'll bring it i know yeah the other area is uh hair color uh our our old policy just used to prohibit any unnatural hair color uh and we've changed that now or they're proposing to change that that hair that distracts from a student's ability to learn or which causes a disruption in the classroom we had a long conversation about is does pink hair or blue hair really disrupt the educational process and we found that probably it did not so they're they're wanting to change that um they added the uh to clarify the um the amount of days excused if they're sent home by the clinic because not all students sent home by the nurse are required to be out the next day this change allows the nurse to determine which days would be excused based on the situation or the reason that they're sent home doesn't change our our fever policy or any of those other areas just um the uh i talked already about the national competition part and then the homework agenda this is different for the uh the middle schools uh they'll no longer receive a hard copy of the agenda it'll be online like it is at the high school and they did reflect that in their the fees that you guys approved i think are that the board approved a month or so ago so they no longer charge students for a hard copy of an agenda for the high school handbook policy changes um jeff harkin teresa owens laura burkhart and troy burkhart all worked on this and i appreciate their efforts really minor changes but i just wanted to share them with the board we used to just mail any a letter home about attendance but we're including a mail or an email so more people are easily reached by email than they are by the regular mail a big change for them in in the academic dishonesty area uh the new policy states that students will receive a zero for the assignment and may result in a loss of credit for the grading period and then the third offense students will fail the course and will result in a loss of credit for the semester so that's just a change in the second and third offense part of the academic dishonesty again we talked about the national competition part for all three handbooks the s to the fifth program you know that if you have attendance and grades we allow students to skip through part of their finals with covid they they modified that policy because not every student was in school every single day they're really asking to return back to their previous attendance requirement that it says each semester a student can be absent a total of two days in the classes they elect not to take a final exam exempted college days are defined by the school policy not included in those two days so students can do an official college visit and it doesn't count as part of those two days and each senior can select a total of four final exams which they'd like to be exempt and the other change that's linked to that again it was coveted related this goes back to the previous policy prior to last year is that a student must be present during the respective class period of the final exam in order to be exempt so those are the the highlights or the low lights depending on your opinion but we're recommending approval of all those changes for the elementary and secondary handbooks any questions for dr long uh real quick these now are once finished are always online at all three levels they all are all always online in the elementary schools we still give out a paper copy that we send home for the parents but they'll also be available online okay any other questions i'm all for that you know that yeah it doesn't disrupt class well there's a glare but anyway okay seeing there's no other questions do i have a motion mr president i move that we approve the 2021-2022 student handbooks as presented thank you mr alexander do i have a second second thank you mr daniels uh we'll start mrs accounts yay your name aye mr hubbard emma yay mr alexander aye mr daniels yay and myself yay motion passes five zero thank you thank you thank you dr our next order of business is to accept bids for the high school renovation project phase two and i assume that's dr long yeah thank you uh this evening i'm recommending that the board approve the changes to the i'm sorry i'm recommending that i did i'm recommending that the board accept the bids too for phase two of the high school renovation project and i you know dr long people always leave when you get up i know i think it was the pink hair comment i don't know what that was i i lost them at that apparently but uh please go ahead and provide some additional information thanks um tonight jim goalie from aecom hunt is with us and i'm probably gonna have to buy gym lunch i didn't know we were gonna be here this long and i told him get here early so i did give him tomorrow off even though he doesn't work for us so uh on july 1st of this year at 11 o'clock we receive bids relative to the renovation of the center grove high school phase two we received a total of 10 bids and two combination bids and after that the lancer and bb are architects and aecom hunt and jim's team did a d scope meeting with all the low bidders and based on their review they're recommending that we accept all the following bids with the fault with the alternates that include alternates one one through eight the really good news is they all came in under our budget which allowed us to do all every single alternate that we had listed so we were pleasantly surprised by that which means by the time we're done with this we'll have touched all the classrooms at the high school so it's really pretty exciting so we're recommending approval of the general trades packet to rl turner corporation and the amount of six million two hundred and two thousand dollars bid packet two for mechanical plumbing and fire suppression be awarded to chambon sons for 3 million 534 the electrical and technology packet awarded to james babcock for a million 386 thousand dollars uh bid packet four lighting general awarded to energy harness corporation for 131 thousand eight hundred and twenty five dollars and bit packet five lighting in general for the tunable classrooms award also awarded to energy harness for the amount of sixty seven thousand five hundred dollars that's a total of eleven million seventy four thousand eight hundred fifty nine dollars and like i said it came in under our estimate and it came in under our budget amount too so we're recommending that the board approve all of these bids or accept all these bids thank you dr long are there any questions for dr long on the bid process just just a couple of questions first glad to hear it came on their budget but i hate to have jim sit back there and not at least get answered one question he's been very patient oh no he's waiting on my standard question well i know what yours is but but on the general trades six million two hundred thousand two dollars we only got one bid what yeah what do we think the day it did we actually had three after the companies structural steel bids were scarce and the two bidders that were also here never received a stressful steel bed oh wow so it was a shortage of supplies you believe that led to the because i know not too long ago we bid the emergency operations center and i think we one of the packages we had 15 20 people submit bids and i ask that for two reasons one to see the trending as we plan as what comes next and then second i'm assuming you're you're really recommending acceptance because if it goes back out there's a chance to ski this deal is even more scarce the nice thing too is r.l turner is currently working on the pool and the uh the phase one of the renovation as well so we're familiar with the work right and so we're pleased with the leadership that they provide too thank you so with with approval here in a minute are you when do you plan to start um july 2022 he's still your second question write that one down kids and okay and bill jim and bill since since we do have folks here could you just give a quick overview what phase two is because i don't think um phase two will be some renovation of some of the classrooms that we didn't touch but primarily it's the backfill of the old pool and the creation of an art area so we'll put the art rooms over there and then we also are going to put the wrestling room relocating the wrestling room making that room an lgi or large group instruction room and then the old art classrooms will be renovated into being just traditional classrooms so we'll gain about seven or eight classrooms out of that by the time we're done thanks any other questions or comments new pools beautiful just fyi and just a compliment on getting done ahead of schedule there how far how long yeah we were about almost 45 days ahead of schedule and under budget so that means june mr alexander i got it that means june hey jim my wife was happy to hear that you were done a little early [Laughter] the students will be very happy when it's all done as well we're still waiting on the video of dr long jumping in the pool not going to happen okay scene is no further discussion uh do i have a we didn't do a uh mr president i move that we accept the bids for phase two of the high school renovation project thank you mr daniels do i have a second second thank you mr alexander start with you mr daniels yay yay mr alexander yay mr hubbard mrs counts thank you and i am ea so it passes 5-0 thank you very much thank you okay that concludes uh business there we're going to other business anyone not not tonight we've been here mr hubbard mr alexander any other business mr daniels dj any final comments yeah yeah i got um or if you have anything from central nine yes no um you know school board members are we're all voted in on like nonpartisan tickets i guess um and i'm kind of seeing stuff on facebook because of you know with teachers or people are kind of kind of making comments about teachers kind of implementing their religion or their sexual preference or their ideology whatever it may be and so people are trying to get political stuff around for that i really hope we don't get to that point you know we really don't want that on boards so that's the only thing that i got mr alexander anything mr daniels i guess i'll just second briefly what joe said i mean as as i said when when i stood up and ran the second time you know we educate all the children no matter who the kid is we don't pick our children they pick us we're a public school we'll always be a public school no matter where they are we want to meet them where they're at we want to make them better that's our job no matter what that is our job exceptional educational experiences so the only other thing i want to add is for those that support the city of education foundation know about it the gale is coming up in august there's still tickets available please please please it's a wonderful organization that provides additional funding for things that we don't have the money to do extra things for teachers extra things grants and the likes so please if you can make it to the gala it's a really nice event thank you thank you mr daniels mrs counts do you have any comments uh rob stole it amy i'm sorry i i should have let you done that tickets to the gala so please everybody if you've never been it's actually a really sunny a really great great time i've been several years it is a great organization surveying the board for four years please come out and support them and amy it's august 14th correct 14.
those 260 students resulted in 1 315 students being quarantined so because we were quarantining at six foot social distancing at that time now why we don't have all of the data regarding the quarantine we only know of one individual of that 1 315 students that developed covet while in quarantine so um that's not linked necessarily to the school it just means that while they were in quarantine they developed covalent so when you look at our positivity rate and we kept track of our positivity rate by week through the entire school year central never had a positivity rate of over one percent of its population and again we we had um policies in place and some of those policies are going to continue because one of the things that the cdc guidance really stresses is that you look at layered prevention measures so you look at layered prevention measures and masking is just one of those layered prevention measures we have many more that are in effect and continue to be in effect such as daily sanitation and disinfecting of our surfaces so we will be continuing with daily uh disinfecting and sanitation of all of our facilities other things that we've done is we've increased our ventilation flow uh we've worked with that so that we've been able to increase our our air turnover rate to help maintain a healthier environment we've increased the disinfecting of our coils and we've um installed where wherever possible more advanced merv filters uh which are recommended for dealing with this type of virus that that's out there so we've we've taken some of those measures um social distancing to the greatest extent possible so we're waiting to receive updated guidance on contact tracing and on quarantine i was told today that we can expect updated guidance from idph most likely later this week what i believe is going to happen is that they're going to and again this is just this is what my thoughts right now doesn't mean that it's going to happen i believe what will happen is that they're going to align uh contact tracing with the three foot distancing and um our classroom desks are able to be set up for three-foot social distancing for for students again the goal is to keep students in school to the greatest extent possible they want students in school in their seats getting their education other things that we still be required to do is exclude individuals who are symptomatic from we'll have to exclude individuals that are symptomatic from our school buildings you know been waiting then for uh verification from health officials on their status i would not be quarantining anyone that would that falls underneath the king county health department so i'm not i'm not a medical professional i wasn't trained in any of that yeah i don't claim to be i'm just telling you from what i've learned from my meetings with kent county health department other health officials like failure raised problems that we've had with children not achieving what they could have achieved had they been in school full-time without math are you using both metrics or just i'm health going to enter into discussion right now with community because this is a meeting for the board for the board to hear that discussion um but i would be happy to speak with you on the phone if you'd like to call me so um so these mitigations are in place and when you look at the cdc guidance the cdc guidance recommends that um all unvaccinated individuals ages two and up where a mask went inside schools it's um again as people stated it's not a mandate it's a it's a strong recommendation from cdc that unvaccinated individuals should wear a mask and that's right there in the cdc guidance so when we look at our other issues such as positivity rate and when we look at other things that are occurring we have to realize that that everything is subject to change everything is subject to change because even right now we're three weeks away before students come back into our buildings and conditions could change and then guidance could change from the state as well but that said um underneath the layered prevention strategies that the board has at their disposal you do have um you do have some some choice so it really ranges from a more conservative approach to a more liberal approach to the mitigation factors the most conservative approach would be to require masking and anyone on h2 to age 12 who's unvaccinated um somewhere in the middle of that continuum because what i believe will be aligned with the social distancing guidance at three feet would be that when social distancing cannot be maintained at three feet and students were together under three feet then that masking would take place the example would be at the elementary school if students were in their classroom seats they would not have to wear a mask if they were moving their cubbies or working in small group work they would be messed up at that time in the in the cafeteria when they were when they're eating of course they would not have to wear a mask but if they were done eating and they're within that three foot social distancing then mask use um would be expected you would you would ask that that they comply with mass use at that point so and then um to the other end of it so let me clear can we clarify again todd that for for lack of a better description i mean this discussion is ours to be had correct right these are our children your voice does matter we haven't even said what we're doing we haven't made a choice yet i think the board the board has to have a chance to discuss this amongst themselves they haven't even done that yet so what what is also in the board's preview if they would decide to do is to say that that um they strongly recommend they follow the cdc's guidance and say we strongly recommend that unvaccinated people age uh two and up where we're a mask in buildings and then so i think it's important to also i will highlight is being on the board for three years we've never engaged in discussion you know during these discussions so this is not any different than any other time that we've discussed anything in front of everyone obviously as we've all everyone is acknowledged right like this is it's a heated and people are really passionate but again this has been consistent with every meeting that i've been a part of it for 35 months at this point that we we really don't engage back and forth you're talking about our kids well i'm sorry it's not going to be exception sir so we're going to finish our discussion please stop okay you are and you did and we if you would like further information please contact us we'd be happy to get back to you the administration is more than willing and once we actually make a decision if you stick around you'll probably hear the decision okay okay i'm sorry you feel that way there should be some communications this is time for board discussion it's time for report discussion public comment has concluded sorry todd redone so i think you know i i've battled back and forth of this kind of to talk about i have i've mentioned a buddy of mine who's at lori in his communication with the cdc every week because of what he does at lurie as an infectious disease doctor and really kind of talking back and forth with him and i really think that the concern for me is that if if let's say there is some recommendation made that masks need to be worn at certain parts of the building at certain times of day based on how crowded kids are let's say transitioning into the building and todd and i had talked about this last week as i think a really creative solution um that when butts are in seats you're unmasked it's you know understandably i know we had an educator speak which i certainly appreciated um so this idea that when we're there especially our k2s who do need who do need that facial stuff we have that capacity to do that in classrooms but that said too any recommendation that's made now also to the whole point of this tiered approach right is that as we follow metrics we can say great we're doing well enough let's continue to move in the direction just like we did all last year by the way we pushed as hard as we were allowed to push at ultimately the recommendation of dr monica and dr stern us essentially following their recommendation which i think we were fairly unanimously in support of from what i recall um and so i think that the challenge from my perspective is if it isn't it's it's it's should be optional all the time the perception is going to be that you know we are forcing kids to wear masks when instead saying great like i think any time you're in this all or nothing category it gets really dangerous so either you have to wear masks all the time or else or we should never have to wear masks at all and i just don't think either one of those are realistic for the start of a school year that is my take on it it's really scary for me as a physician to be like we were masked full-time nine weeks ago not even nine weeks so by the time the school year starts it'll be nine weeks from the end of the school year and then to kind of move to we're just going to do you know it's going to be parent choice essentially family choice we'll call it right that that parents can can be in charge and again as somebody who fiercely believes in autonomy in my office fiercely believes in autonomy when it comes to medication and all that i appreciate the passion that people have had um and so you know the choice that i make for my kids they know what they're going to be doing next school year that's just because they know what their expectations are going to be and i think that having some sort of compromise i don't know is the right word because i don't feel like my my desire to consider something else other than 100 masking at all times is based on trying to appease anyone or anything like that but i really think based on the metrics that we have in our area and the data that we had last year now granted that was obviously wearing masks to be very clear right 100 masking at all times i think we we're we have the luxury of pushing a little bit away from mandatory masking for the full day i do not to be very clear at this point i do not think that should flip to it is just it's optional you can do whatever you want whatever parents choose whatever you know parents kids choose when they're not around their parents whether that's opposite of their parents or what their parents think whatever that is um i don't i think that's a little bit dangerous to go that far right on day one i think that might be let's check for four weeks and see what happens what about we get through labor day weekend and that's three and a half weeks and then a week after that we say what happens after but that's only 27 28 days of school what would happen if we used our data then to see what's happening to see where we are and i've talked to todd and jeff about the fact that just because of our zip codes we're fairly isolated we can isolate our zip codes for our district specifically with the exception of 60175 basically which pulls all of that west side of st charles in so i think we have the luxury if the king county health department can get us that data in an accurate fashion i think we do have the luxury of doing that because of where we sit so we can do things differently than u-46 we can do things differently than aurora and even geneva and st charles to be fair us and kaneland are fairly similarly situated as far as the makeup of our district's rural and all that kind of stuff so i would like to see us be a little bit more assertive while recognizing that there are probably going to be times in the day because of how kids are physically around each other that there may have to be some some on and off but that would still include over 90 if not 95 percent of the day unmasked for the most part which i think i told todd that i think that was a really creative option for for especially for k5 and to be very clear which are we mostly talking about k5 right now okay i just want to re-clarify that yeah this discussion is really pretty much focused around ec5 okay well we're suggesting that 612 go with uh optional mass obviously we would always recommend that they weren't mass if they so desire or if they're vaccinated but it's optional um but for ec5 i think our our belief is as well that academically we do believe similar to where i think the second grade teacher will spoke about the phonemic pieces childhood first and second k it's essential that they can see the mouse uh so if we can get them inside the building within that three feet which is generally a characteristic of our classroom it's a little bit more of a struggle for early childhood or kindergarten i did have the pleasure of speaking with our vice president of our union who is also an early childhood teacher uh who does believe it's also essential and feels confident that that's a good choice for us to move forward with i think making sure we still have mitigation factors in place we will be removing um the sanitation in terms of hand sanitizers from the elementary based on the cdc recommendation but every school except for the lake has classroom sinks i think we'll have to develop a rotation for washing hands especially if we aren't masking and they would mask to go to the bathroom if they're going to be closer than that three feet distancing i think music is a concern making sure that you know it's up to the teacher but if music if they're singing with closer than three feet they're gonna have to take some additional things but we would want to set protocols for some of those elements to ensure that people are feeling confident so art and music are larger classrooms than our standard classrooms are similar yes they could be larger but for not elementary they're pretty much a classroom so they're pretty similar with our matches in middle school and high school they're a little larger and just based on spacing alone if we you know x is on x's on the floor whatever that might be three feet we could we could be within that recommendation and potentially a mask softening yes okay what about the tables that we have in art are they able to be do we need more tables in the art classrooms and there are great schools two people per table which is close to three feet they're pretty pretty good size they might be a little two and a half feet you know i think it's up to a teacher where they locate them replace them um for the most part and the cdc guidance does state that there there may be times when individuals need to be closer than than three feet for certain types of work this guided agreement if and if that's the case then you have to look at your layered prevention strategies that you have in place for the for that time being right so i have a question so what you're saying i think what uh eric is saying and doctor what you're saying is that in lieu of just having a blanket policy that look in this uh ec through five we're just gonna have the masks we're trying to craft a policy that creates as much flexibility to allow the kids to be in those classrooms without the masks is that right the second thing is that you were saying dr stern that the the layered mitigations have to be informed by the metrics and the metrics of of health and a lot of the metrics that you described from the last year where we were in the throes of coven were very good for us but we have to recognize don't mean that that was because we had masks and other layers of mitigation so those positive outcomes were a consequence of these efforts i think i think for sure correlated maybe not necessarily causative probably a combination of the two for sure for sure sure but but that and that's where again i would say if we get past the first time we're having really any kids in our buildings without masks on that that if we wanted to pull back further to say you know what maybe we start with k2 so at pick pick a time it's an arbitrary time some point in the future sooner rather than later we look at what our metrics are in the district and the community by the way right it's not just about our numbers of our students because that's not a metric of like where we are in in our central part of kane county but that we then would look and say all right at what point do we say we need to look again and say man we've done really really well we've only had x positive cases um we've we've had no secondary case positives that might be correlated to a positive case in school i think this does um continue to rely on the the the good will and honesty of our families right so we don't send somebody to school who's coughing incessantly we don't send somebody to school who has 100 100.5 fever just because well they feel fine i mean so i think that that just again has to be stated that we need to make sure that people are still doing their best the same way when we weren't thinking about cove it was just the flu you wouldn't send your kid to school their runny nose had a fever and malaise like you shouldn't be sending your kid to school right which what you said is important because we're no longer doing um the daily self monitoring no longer requiring that of of students to enter the buildings but we would ask that if people are symptomatic that they that they stay home and that they they seek proper medical care uh you know for whatever it is so the self-certification will not occur and just to clarify too i i think i saw this in one of our emails do we have two liaisons this year again for k5 we are still trying to shake that out i think at the middle school in high school and talking with um karen dave we believe middle school high school will be better served by teachers working with the students who might be out for any reason vacation whatever they're out for elementary we're still trying to determine if some staff last year liked it some staff prefer to do it on their own maybe giving them a choice uh definitely probably keeping two just for the flexibility so there is good communication between the teacher and the home in the event that a teacher doesn't have the time to do there to keep with the um we get a glance some of that information was on campus for our parents and community members so that our liaisons can work with students who are out for an extended point of time if that's the case um so we are still looking maybe two but we may increase that if we find that teachers really do think that's beneficial it could be one per building um we're still kind of shaking that out right now to see where the opinions might be from teaching staff if teachers prefer to do it on their own then there may not be a necessity to increase that number and there'll be no video this year that were like video access synchronized no uh as a matter of fact for the if we have students who may be on for a long time we may have to go to maybe edmentum which would be our video course for an extended course to keep up for any course yep to help them stay abreast of the content if they need additional assistance the the growth high school the goal is to accomplish what we've always wanted as administration on board that is to have all of our kids in school to the greatest extent possible and um that remains and why why i would like to see covid completely behind us i think we're we're all in agreement with that we're we're not quite there he had and there is issues as we go into the fall and like i said we did really well last year we did really well last year and i expect that we will continue to do well i i just think that we need to consider a measured approach and that's why um i thought like at the elementary level whenever you cannot maintain social distancing of three feet at that point you would need to wear a mask one at your cubby when working in a small group type situation i do believe that that is most in line with the recommendation of the cdc and then as as dr nolan said i think we can look at at our metrics data at our local data because we're different our community is different than um sections of belgium other sections of belgium or other sections of aurora for instance so i think you need to when you look at king county you have to look at your region and what's happening in your school district as well um i think i know uh esther you mentioned um that heroes in favor especially of the you know younger kids and and being able to be without masks um and uh i know i think you're still here she hiding back there hi i'm sorry i'm just kind of just out of curiosity esther i guess you can speak unless uh we have anybody for cure so general kind of set consensus on the part of teachers at all levels we don't really have a consensus as far as comfort level or whatever that might be i think it's mixed i think again you're you're looking at what you're seeing in our community it's a mixed bag of where uh staff are at um obviously anybody can mask up if they so desire and choose to do so um i think with no matter which way we go you know it's not unlike last year there's never an easy way to make a popular decision we're not going to 100 either way we go um same thing for our staff we're trying to get a sense of where we're at i think dave didn't have a good handle on the middle school high school yet he had not like surveyed them hadn't heard too much karen had the opportunity to hear from some of her staff and the student or teachers at that level that some of them i think primarily because it is hard to teach phonics it's hard to teach emotions it's hard to teach those elements in early elementary when you cover up half your face and you're only seeing your eyes um so they found it was very difficult for literacy for some of the social emotional learning that needs to occur to have them messed up so that's where the creative idea of you know at least one of their classrooms which is primarily most of their day for elementary unmask them so that we can get them the education that they need so we don't have further delay in terms of some of the academic progress that we're hoping to see with our students this year please note that you know teachers respect as administration board we respect the viewpoints we respect the viewpoints of of all who reach out whether whether or not they agree or disagree with us or whether or not i may personally agree or disagree with them um one of the tenants of our district is that we've always always been respectful and tried to focus on on the currency of ideas and um i think that i've received just like i've received numerous emails from members of your group expressing your viewpoint i have received numerous emails as well from other community members asking that we continue with with masking as well so they're even in our community there's there's different viewpoints you know that's just the way that's the way life is so i think as as a school board as we move forward when we look at the guidance i'd like to see what the quarantine guidance um actually states when it comes out um because that that may clarify too as far as like our contact racing like i want it to be aligned i'm hoping that it's going to be aligned but what that comes out with that can that can help the board with even a more important decision as well and that quarantine issue uh and the contact tracing issue is related to the the impact that um the school have with the number of kids required to be out of class because of exposure is that right correct so the the the the um less stringent the um the quarantine requirements are from the public health departments the more flexibility the school will have the school board will have in crafting these policies is that am i understanding that is correct okay that's correct and there's there's still discussion going on um and again strong feelings uh on both sides of this but there's still discussion going on at the state level regarding um optional optional testing which then could be tied to the shortening quarantine or avoiding quarantine and i say optional testing because there are a couple tests that are out there there's the bindex now test which is a nasal swab which is now free to school districts but you have to get a clia waiver which is not easy to get and then there's the shield test which i heard today from the health department is now going to be made free for all school districts it's a saliva test it's a pcr test but again that would be something that even if the district did move in that direction that would be that would be something that people would have to opt into so and i can't tell you the amount of teachers who flooded my inbox with support of us reopening those schools but they were served as a teacher's union and they're scared of being publicly crucified they find so much data so i'm just saying that that you guys implement that are unrealistic and that they are just scared to speak up because of being publicly used so one thing you know i think we've done a really good job following guidance from the county health you know they're following the guidance from the cdc we're taking what the county health says and as a board member for 10 years so long but i think that's that's our best way of approaching this we're not medical doctors on this board we're at some are you our educators we all are volunteering because we have a passion some of us are medical doctors sorry eric dr nolan you are a medical doctor i am not jeff is not i don't believe you two are no i could be wrong so personally i feel the most comfortable going with the guidance that's given to us from the people that are making these decisions and we've done this for a year and a half and i think continuing on that same path it makes it pretty easy for people to kind of expect what we're gonna do because we're following along with what they're hearing in other places and that's i think we should i personally feel we should continue down that same road it's proven positive for us up till now and i think it'll still prove it to clarify what does that mean that you would be in favor of what's what todd has said kind of what you guys think we're talking about that's what i just want to clarify that's the guidance i've heard is what they're saying is when you can maintain that social distance of three feet of three feet masks off when we're in other areas if they're saying we shouldn't we should be looking at masks we should be doing that it's what are they saying as you're moving around from places and as we said too i mean we're three three weeks and two days away from the start of the school year so who knows what's going to be imposed at some point but the whole the whole time through the school year last year we were always looking for when is the next restriction going to be lifted so we can push that and so i think that in the interest again of starting off in a metered fashion in a tempered fashion with a goal and i i would i again i'd throw data out there in the future whatever that means five weeks i don't i don't care what date that is but we figure out like what does that mean and at what point can we um increase the capacity for again for instance ec2 to have more time with unmasked and then again what does that look like when we do another oh great now we can do three five because we're looking really good and now we can have k5 unmasked for those who choose to do so for those who choose to mask right so then we we may have the flexibility but i think that that's where we use the data we have now to inform you know i think a moderately assertive but appropriate intervention plan with the goal that we continue to push where we can to use the best data that we have which again we're relying on another entity to provide us that data to be fair so that's just something we're we're left at the at the you know the the will of the king county health department um and so that would be a potential you know just time frame thing for us again todd you guys know best what that communication is like um but i think that that is i think that's a reasonable place to start and i know you mentioned that we already need to have another meeting anyway which we can talk about in closed session officially which would be before school starts obviously correct for the budget yeah so i think that gives us another opportunity to kind of sort out if anything has changed that we need to kind of change our recommendation for that well it has to be so we'll talk about that in closed session there will be a special board meeting that will need to be scheduled for um looking at tons of budget and we would probably tie any future recommendations to that meeting there's yes between people in the community or does the community just go up there and speak and you guys sit there silently and then you guys make your speech with no rebuttal at all is that how it typically works yes yes is the honestly i'm kind of confused by what you're saying i think the actions we're looking at are for ec through fifth grade to be unmasked as long as they're within that three feet and above distance under three feet we're asking that they put mask on so to travel if they're going in the hallway closer and going out as a whole classy to the restroom doing those types of things if they're outdoors obviously unmasked for six through 12 we're suggesting that uh it is recommended that unvaccinated individuals wear a mask just like they said but basically it's not it's an optional um opportunity for students and parents to make those two choices for six through twelve that's we're gonna recommend to the students that they do that yes okay just i mean to me it seems kind of difficult for a teacher when they're all on math to say okay now it's mass time um i think a simple saying that's good i think most kids will do it um obviously it's not mandated so we're recommending that the kids it's not we're not trying to take a lot of time to do this um the whole catching cove or any other thing is probably airborne and somebody said you know you have to be there for five reload 15 minutes next to him we're talking so it's like walking down the hallway to go to the cafeteria isn't gonna happen so it's almost like why bother yeah that's my kind of my eyes and you know you're in line to get your food half the kids are already sitting down eating because they bring your sack lunch um you know it just seems like i don't know i'm all over looking at metrics i've got a period in time and obviously we get more strict guidelines we have to do it last year we were on a mass mandate so that's what we did great we're not we're discussing it right no matter what you guys have said we're discussing this um for the first time and so we need to figure it out so we have options but you know after seeing these it's fine i think we're fine to go with that option and recommend but just so the public knows it's not a mandate and if you feel strongly about your kid not wearing it they don't obviously have to and for those that do they will but it's still a recommendation to try and keep everybody safe so and be respectful trying to be considerate this is what we're going to recommend to our students right i agree and i would agree with you jeff i mean i i i would assume that you know we would support our teachers and saying we're going to do our best but we're not going to have arguments in class over that right like i completely agree with minimizing any sort of impact i tell people that even when i go to a restaurant like i don't even say anything to my kids they don't could go to the bathroom daddy sure and they just are in the habit of putting a mask on just because that's what they're in the habit of doing i don't tell them they have to dish as they have it with them and that's just what they do they like their masks it has personality they don't care um you know so for most it's not a big deal right and in my office i don't wear a mask when i'm in the office with my patients um uh but you know that that's you know kind of where we are and that's again my that's my choice right and that's what my kids have just been around and that's just what they do on their own um so uh you know you know so i i think that we i like what you guys have come up with and i think that's a great place to start with the goal of continuing to push forward as we feel we have sufficient data to do as reasonably safely as possible right nothing's foolproof we know of course i mean i was in the schools a lot last year i was in kindergarten classes a lot like of course they're not staying six feet apart to the best of the teachers are doing their best so it's not about either israel isn't happening it's are we doing our best to meet to meet those goals as laid out by the entities that are making the recommendations to your point laura right um people certainly above and beyond my pay grade to to to know it to have that information so we're gonna what i'm hearing us say i just want to make sure we're all clear so what i'm hearing is that um we are strongly recommending the students wear a mask if they're under three feet distancing um anything that's three feet or more we are not requiring that they may amass it at any time during that time and if you take it off it becomes unsanitary so you're asking now that these kids take on and off the map to go into the washroom where fecal matter is floating in the air and then put that thing back on your face like this just doesn't seem right so so again i mean with the way that i kind of formulated my head is if your butt's in a seat you you know the recommendation would be that you know you are not required to wear a mask and if your butt's not in the seat and you're moving around theoretically a class or in the bathroom right where you might now we can put more than one kit or whatever i forget we're doing last year however it was that they were kind of trying to limit the bathroom time and i think that that's kind of you know a reasonable thing to start with as laid out but you just said esther recommended not required when moving around that's the key recommend it recommended when moving around early childhood through fifth grade they're at 12th grade you're 12.
you'll notice we print some data we lift out we left out 2020 because of cobit it's it's not it doesn't match up it doesn't it kind of excuse results we intentionally did not put that in here we'll be curious to see what 2021 brings and then you can see here there's solar arrays being put at north side i already have at taylorsville and northside middle school and another project you'll hear recommended tonight to further uh reduce energy costs uh and and this the seven categories uh are safe welcoming community efficiency flexibility accessibility and innovation i think over the years we've you know accessibility we've made great strides on from even 10 years ago in your buildings safe you really address through your current security projects welcoming's always been in community i mean you have 18 school buildings some of them most of them unique and challenging and many now 50 to 60 years old so that makes it even more challenging to keep that architectural heritage up for your community flexibility and innovation the two that kind of brought to light i think something that we've done a lot at the high school level i think in indiana here in the past five six years you've seen a lot happening at elementary's in in war middle schools is the challenge of bringing kind of doing what you did in high schools and bringing that down to the next level of students as they go through their their four year or 12 years or 13 years of education so we'll talk a little bit more about that so assessment this year was started right as the government hit so we had a lot of zoom calls with all the principals walked all the buildings kind of during the summer time cleanest year buildings i've ever been without students there we met with like dr hack and mr others and learned about special programs incorporate some of these new metrics and then compile the overall report um you should have got the full 225 page report this is a summary i don't expect you guys to read all this but just the highlights of how to read it and how to go through it there's a grading scale of one to four one being the best it's like if we build a new building this is what we would do this would be our goal to you know it should be a one with all the metrics of what we're trying to do today in education and then efficiencies and security and all of that um if it's a two it's probably means it's just down a grade it's you know it could be you know if it's flooring material it's kind of worn it's you know maybe when it gets to three where i need to replace it but it's just on the radar for that if it's uh you know it could be you know office space we know we we just short a couple office spaces and we really need more if it's if it's something on the educational adequacy side um three gets moderate as we really start should be looking at something to put on the radar to replace at some point and then if it's a four it should be a high priority to to address and then changes from 2016 if you see a green box around something when we get to the big rubric that means it went up in score generally that means there was work involved to get it there some improvement there's some dollars spent to do that if you see a red box around it and shaded that means it went down that that could be from aging could be from introducing a new program just like your elementary schools you introduce a stem program as part of your special well known your building's had a room for that and so you're teaching off a card you're teaching in a regular classroom so you see some deficiencies in that just because of that new program introduced and another one is just because security you introduced school resource officers you introduced mental health professionals at buildings well none of them have office space and many of our buildings were already challenged with office space and that just made it a little bit worse and so we have some people in closets or storage rooms places that typically don't want to see people and staff so this is just a metric of the seven principles i won't go into a lot of this there's a summary page on this in a couple slides but i mean generally very good you see some more yellow on the innovative and flexibility sides as well as a little bit on efficiencies that's for your 1-4 and just show you what that is that's northside middle school and so this is your energy ui from the last 10 years and so each building has a score and it could go up or down a little bit each year because of how bad the winter was or how hot it was during the summer so you'll see that flux and see what how that happens you know north side is your worst performing school by far that's high on the list for mechanical replacement but it's it's a big building so it's going to take a lot to replace it um more dollars than we have coming this way and some other ones you'll see a couple of the blue boxes that's kind of what happens at a building we put in a new more efficient system and just as we did at the two bottom one smith in taylorsville received vertical units that we play classroom unit ventilators so not only did you get a system that was a lot quieter and you got a system that controlled humidity better as well as kept better temperature and more efficient and both of these actually bring in direct outside air independent of other rooms in the building so we've been coping it's a great situation so just give you an idea of you know how that impacts that this is before led lighting so led lighting will bring a whole new metric to this once that plays into it so just a few observations um you know i think the biggest thing i kind of mentioned was innovation flexibility and just really starting to if you want to approach that at other buildings um and then just really preserving the heritage that you have here and so these are kind of the overall rubrics for each building combined so you can see the top row is all the school buildings across the top and down the side is the different categories this is code compliance safety environmental summary for each building so if you see like a lot of like uh the fourth row down you see a lot of green shaded across that means you approved a lot across that one category and that's that's the security category so do all those supremacy you did you can kind of see what what difference that made we actually created a new security category we had two we split it into three this year just because of the enhancements that were made and so we could track that a little bit better and separate it outside from inside so you'll see some you may see a couple that go down only because part of what was the good in that category got moved to another category um let's see like if you see a one that goes down like transportation you see a lot of positive green shading on that's because you know you did at work at the entire building and so you got the improvements there so nothing really you know jumped out here nothing got a lot worse we got quite a few things that get a lot better the next category is physical conditions maintenance and efficiencies um you know i think the one of the worst ones you'll see is is the first one is paving and that's that's always the last thing people want to do is spend money on paving and i can't blame you when there's other things that are probably higher priority so if some of those things worsen then you know at some point you have to address and you've done some of that um but it's just you know this is just one of those things um playgrounds you see that is all improved for elementary and that shading there so again you kind of see a lot of a lot of up a lot of down um you know nothing tremendous you know i think the one the red on here is the roof ecliptic creek it's really gotten to a point where it's it's pretty bad you'll see that on our improvement list at the end and then educational adequacy this is one we over the past four years we really have not done a lot on this to address anything in this list so you see mostly some red going down a lot of that is you know the introduction of stem it's it's office space it's things like that that um just little things that got worse as it went along um but again you know most years we've spent some dollars here and you see a lot more green on this just this past four years there was kind of a different emphasis and so for each building there's a several slides like this in here this is just parkside for example till the year it was built in 1962 so you got a building that's over 60 years old now approaching 60.
correct correct besides besides it being a great event it raises a lot of funds that that can be are used for grant money back into the education system here at center grove especially grants to the teachers uh and uh it's just a great opportunity on that one mr er dr arkanov do you have any comments um yeah sure i know that a lot of folks left but i didn't want to miss the opportunity to share a little bit first the thing is the parent information meeting that's next week um you know it's it's not a sit and get forum i mean there will be a presentation christy by the way i think if she's still here there you are you moved around yeah so um great job tonight i know you're going to present that again it's important that people provide information questions to her ahead of time so her and the team can research and get answers to that it's not about conjuring up things i mean we're a professional organization and we want to address the questions ahead of time and be able to do that but not only that there will be breakouts during those meetings where her and dr hoover right over there and the rest of the teaching and learning department will be breaking out and facilitating conversations with parents so that you'll have an opportunity to have a more intimate conversation with those that formulate these lessons another thing is that i want to just say it again we do not use castle and those lessons that we're putting together will not be anything from castle so i want to make sure that was clear and and christy said that we are independent of that the other uh thing uh there was some question about uh videoing in the classroom and so forth and uh one of the things i i'd like to say is and i believe it's still there um mrs nelson correct me if i'm wrong but i believe that your school has put together some examples online am i correct of teaching many different subjects and so learn cg thank you thank you yes and so you can actually see those things and you've been doing that for a couple of years now um it's great work i've watched a few and really enjoyed that lastly the comments made about sorry it's on the website it's on center grove elementary's website forward slash learn cj thank you lastly the comments about employees and what we do when employees cross the line or make mistakes and so forth and we have policies for that and we we deal with that appropriately that is not something that we share out in a community form that is confidential as everyone should understand so when discipline is taken we don't pronounce that to the world so we have a system in place through an evaluation model that we use we respect privacy for folks when it comes to that and our our leaders do a an excellent job in overseeing that process and mr taylor and the human resources department does a great job of making sure that we do that within the law and protecting the privacy of everyone involved so i just want to make sure people understand we do have a process for that so with that i think the only other thing that i wanted to make sure is the um the pool will have a we're going to have a open house for the for the new natatorium and also it's in it's a along the same time that we're dedicating the track to mrs toomey and that will be on august 27th and we'll have more information out about that thank you dr arkanov um i think a lot of the comments have already been made we do appreciate very much i wish everyone was still here and i wish we had this kind of involvement at all times no matter what the subject matter is you are our checks and balances as the parents if you were here tonight you probably have a home that is a loving caring home for your child not the case for a lot of homes it's a different situation so that faces us with the you know responsibility of how do we get those children to be connected involved able to learn their lessons as well as not prevent others from learning their lessons so this is is the picture we we are working with and uh but i do want to reiterate by all means stay involved be a part of the strategic planning committee that's coming up uh is hopefully everything stays healthy so we can move forward with that that is where you can get your voices heard again uh so please pass that along with everyone and again pass it along about the meeting next wednesday the opportunities will be there for having the back and forth and the understanding with each other so with that there's a few other dates next board meeting is august 19th here in the boardroom uh september's meeting has been moved it is now going to be on september 23rd the following thursday instead uh several conflicts going on that that evening and the rest of you took the rest of the dates ahead on that one so see no further issues the board meeting is adjourned
12th grade so it puts illness back on you so my question then is in the the last academic year was it also a recommendation that our kids wear masks in the last academic year we were under a mask mandate that has been removed okay we are no longer under a masking mandate right so now it's up to us to decide whether or not prevention measures so and also some of the stats jay were keep in mind some of the buildings were at half capacity because the kids were monday wednesday or thursday friday that's right um you know or tuesday thursday or tuesday friday i you know some people the stats aren't really you can't put your arms around them right so but that's a good point i i didn't think about that so now everybody's going to be in the building correct so that actually raises the concern that previously you had a fraction of the student bodies in the building now you have the entirety but for fourth so i think the data for fourth quarter though didn't we didn't see a significant increase when we had everybody in the building okay so we we have you know eight we have eight weeks of data nine weeks of data yeah our rates remained low even when we brought back greater populations of students and again i think it was due to to many variables i don't think it was just one variable but we had we had layered prevention strategies in place last year and what i'm saying is that going to this year we have to have layered prevention strategies too we just have to be well thought out and how and what's reasonable with them you know to keep it to keep everyone safe because comments that were made were accurate you you you have to have enough exposure and enough viral load and if you're just walking past someone you know when they sneeze it's going to be very very unlikely that you're going to pick up something but if you are around someone and they have that viral load and you're around them for a decent length of time then the odds do increase we did do 19 weeks so in 192 week periods we did uh from august 31st all the way to june 4th we tracked every two weeks the percentages so a fee if that's in your packet that we can keep components well you can see we never had over that one percent positive rate that dr stewart talked about we talked about the number of students we took the number of people that were currently in-house so it wasn't students that stayed home so from the beginning of the year we had about 3 800 individuals that were in our school system every day you know coming back and forth either morning afternoon or all day and at the end of the year we finished at 3 934 people so we had a good 70 to 75 percent of our body our both our teaching body and our student body in-house and we never exceeded one percent of positivity rate as we monitored the positive cases we had a lot more out in quarantine we did not count those because they had to go but they did not become covert positive they did not contract when you think about the mitigating factors we had last year we had masks that was one of the mitigating factors but all the other medicating factors were keeping in place the sanitation the disinfecting all of that social social distancing whatever possibly wherever possible um the ventilation that dr stern spoke about so all those mitigating factors we are not removing uh we're continuing we still have an extra custodian i have on hand at the middle of the day uh to help with bathrooms you know additional sanitation in the bathrooms some of those areas that are more high contact areas uh that will remain this year as well um and forever to keep kind of that that down we're hoping as well that takes care of some of the flu bug um right that you always see in the school years that you have year over year as well that's stomach thing that goes around just before conference time right because you have the ventilation that hopefully will improve many of those metrics that we put in place those will stay in place as we enter the score even though i mean our positivity rate was low but you can see by looking at the data that uh it was the week after halloween we had a little bit of a spike and then right after the winter break we had a little bit of a spike again we never surpassed one percent but we were one of the few districts to jump in aggressively and put the kids back in school yes right which and we brought people back after the adaptive pause that the health department goes for after thanksgiving yeah we didn't stay closed to bring this up eric you'll love it um so i've witnessed in the community a lot of communities the bullying that's going on about whether you get vaccinated or not you know people are being attacked if they are either being attacked if they're not so what are we going to put in place to just ensure that our kids who do choose to wear masks aren't being attacked or the kids that choose not to wear masks is that kindness awareness i think dr nolan brought that up a little bit earlier we're going to reach we're going to reach a point in our community we're going to have people in our schools that for their own personal reasons they're either not going to be managed or they're going to be masked and what we don't want is we don't want bullying or harassment of individuals for whatever choice they made we would ask that people be respectful of other people's choice so that just might be something teachers need to but we would follow the same bullying guidelines as like out in the handbooks that's just another thing that cause trust me i've watched it a lot in our in in our community in other communities you can't win no matter what you do someone's telling you you did it wrong so um and even coming people coming in the things on facebook nobody's giving any of us a chance to talk about it as a board and they're gonna they're assuming we're gonna do something they disagree with and we're also parents so yeah so we're all feeling the same thing everybody in this room every teacher is feeling on both sides of the fence and it's just i just want to just kind of put it out there and i i feel like that's just another opportunity for i think we all realize that there's strong emotions that that are in play regarding this issue and people feel strongly about it i get that i respect that um we would just ask that people be respectful of individual choice autism exception for my son to wear a shield instead of a mask and he was very excited uh because the mask really most of his glasses and he ended up getting rid of the shield and stop praying because kids were like why aren't you wearing masks and kids were harassing him so he just he was like right it just wasn't going to stand and i just put the mask back on he you know he didn't like it but he said he suffered through it it shouldn't matter at the end of the day and everyone's it's a great opportunity for us to reinforce with our students how to be respectful to others because you never know what decide what they're going through in their lives at the end of the day you know i say that about people i work with all the time you just don't know what else is happening and that if we lead with people are doing what's best we'll all be much more successful through this instead of assuming we're not going to do what's best yep any other comments all right and move on to our kevin project update direct follow is here to give us that info this is the best part of the meeting [Laughter] thank you so capital projects for this summer our central middle school abatement project went off without a hitch we completed that uh the week right after the fourth of july which allowed us to start the window project um the high school window project should be completed by the end of this week and then uh we're gonna bulk up with the second crew to continue on at central middle school some of the operable windows are going to be a little bit delayed just because of you know equipment and and getting that stuff available but we're in pretty good shape with both of those projects uh the central middle school rough replacement went without a hitch also got the gutters on and got everything didn't experience any issues or any hold up so that went really well our staff's working hard at getting buildings cleaned we're probably in most buildings 75 at this point we all know it was a little bit of a short summer so we're going to be uh going right to the very end wrapping things up but that's going really well we got a lot of painting painting work done um some floor replacement at the high school so some of the odds and ends again some of those things just because of material accessibility and timing we're this we kind of scaled back this summer on on the work we tried to do again like i always like to reiterate our staff is is working hard the mitigations you guys speak about our staff takes a lot of pride in what they've done and what they continue to do and i will say that we will continue to do that to make sure those kids can be in those seats because that's where they should be so our staff is going to continue to do the things they've done to make sure that that happened some of the mitigation factors dr stern talked about all the vendors that we work with and the things we try to do in those perspectives are for not just for covid it's for a lot of health it's for all the airborne pathogens that are in their mold everything else so all those the modifications we've done to our air handlers all the things we've done with ionization and the extra disinfecting is going to help for all of that stuff so it's just going to provide better air quality moving forward in all our buildings so that's why we're going to continue doing those things any questions one of the well so which windows at central middle school are going to be held up before the operating the operating windows so it's just the operating windows they'll have all the fixed all the units that will be in it'll just be the operating okay so there'll be there could be some blank supply wood in the ones that they don't have gotcha but everything will be and it'll be usable yeah it won't affect any classrooms thank you any questions thanks dean awesome thank you all right last we have uh foil freedom of information act we received a foil from construct connect requesting our bid tabulations for the asbestos abatement and for our refuge service uh which went to group and so we're able to comply with that foia ensure that information all right that's it for open session with the motion second to journal executive session yes yes yep yes we'll take like five minutes thanks again everyone thank you for coming out
editions that were made kind of a site plan and then for each of the categories and each one there's a verbal description and a score that goes through that so i won't go through all these but just to give you a feel for how to read the document if you choose to do so and go through it um but you know you see like fire detection in this building it's not sprinkled it only has you know smoke detectors in the hallway which if we build a new building we couldn't do either of those we'd had to fully sprinkle the building and smoke detection would be a lot more than that so that's why that's a three and there's other things mechanical acoustic this is school has these um horizontal unit ventilators and so they are noisy they're challenging for teachers to talk over and that's one of the items on the list as well is to replace those with a vertical unit that's a lot more efficient and quieter and then this building has a lot of pavement issues that's and challenges as well with parent pickup drop-off in buses being in front and so we've looked at some things for that um most the others pretty well mechanical again as a is the worst there's a boilers and chillers then you replace this building because of age as well as the unit layers and then uh windows is another one that um are fairly old and some replacements but there's a lot of windows in this building so a lot more to go to to get to that so and just go through classrooms lab space things like that so just kind of skip through this but this an idea how to read that um at the end there's a summary of recommended improvements there's a list of needs for each building obviously we never can do all the needs it's just most of these roll over we do the most important ones and try to you know this document helps decide what those what those are helps you as a as a board and as a district to decide what's most important and then just to kind of summarize of all of it the kind of recommendations for these coming projects roofing replacements obviously keep keep going with that three of the next high priority roofs have been identified solar rays i think probably starting to see the benefits of that and to do that at more buildings and then hvac replacements there's some dollars available to really take advantage of that so you kind of can get the efficiency and then the approved air quality that do both at the same time and then park side is one of our focuses of replacing the hvac and then the windows and dealing with some of the exterior that's not been dealt with yet and then the third point of that i think is is really good is really looking at the educational component of the building and how can we improve and and really use that as our our first elementary building to really target and do the educational improvements as you guys are now doing project-based learning across the district now it's just not at you know your first high school you started you know 12 years ago or 13 however long it's been um it's just you know it's how education is changing and how teachers are working together more and so and your students are collaborating and working in small groups and large groups and the ability for the building support that is is really important and really enhances education and then schmidt um we have that as well that's you'll see here recommending some hvac improvements we actually you'll see that we didn't think we were able to get that in there but we found a way to to add the hvc part into this that's probably your worst building as far as hvac so highest priority but it's it's a bigger building more challenges but we work through with retina staff to get there and then other future things south side north side those are two other buildings on your list south side we've done a lot of work there seeing but it's always been adding classrooms it's never been making it right for the how many kids are there and improving the educational environment and the north side um compare it to central kind of a big contrast and it's showing its age now and needs a good bit of work and there's a swimming pool that you know either needs to be replaced or or are taken out and then there's a couple gymnasium and pe spaces that need a lot of work as well so challenges of that building and then so roll into the next part proposed improvements for this year's chad reference hvsc wise temperature controls i think found a lot of success in making your buildings operate more efficiently by changing out those systems you've got a variety of systems columbus east columbus north got a majority of that replaced with the big projects and have since gotten little portions replaced but it's still not all the way there so this gets us much closer to being 100 and so you control the building with one system instead of a patchwork of multiple ones and then doing the same thing at frederie richards mount healthy and 53 to gain more control of those buildings as well and then unit classroom hvc replacements at schmidt and parkside and then central plan improvements at north side of the boilers that's one thing that's high on the list of improvements um and then it's uh schmidt to do the classroom vented layers there's some one thing to do is that's a two pipe system now you take it to a four pipe system and that means when you have four pipes you can heat and cool at the same time if you only have two pipes you can only heat or cool and so it's always on a in fall or spring difficult to control if you don't have that four pipe so it'll be converting that building to that there's some central pad upgrades that building has all the duct work on the roof that's a fresh air system so it'll be getting rid of that and making it all work with one system instead of having two systems that fight each other so re-ripping the building after that so other work there'll be a little bit of work to support those improvements because it's a different system and it'll take some case work and some vents through the roof and things like that so all that's tied together for schmidt but we'll get the hv system replaced and then at parkside it's kind of a whole host of things to to make improvements there you know we've got the hvac replacement and again it's a two pipe system be taking it to a four pipe system as well um and then just general improvements um architectural work to support those hvrc improvements some a lot of paving and sidewalk repairs looking at trying to get buses in the back of the building what i think we can do improve the drop-off pickup for parents and get some more separation between those two elements just educational improvements to adapt those classrooms and kind of meet current educational needs and pedagogies and then new classroom instructional technology and furniture and furniture is you know as i did my assessment i think one thing i saw out there was there's a lot of principals trying to buy furniture that was collaborative furniture and nobody had enough money to buy all but they you know there's a couple classrooms here and there but that's high on every principles list eventually to get that and then um another one on doctors mr smith's list is the china large cafeteria and only we do that's really trying to take part of the stage out to do that and he's willing to do that to do that as well as the classroom window replacements so just an idea of how we might be able to create a in the back of a bus slot that's also a hard surface lot that can be the play area during the day and it's gated off and and then so you can safely get the buses back there and get them out of the front of the building and then potentially even connect the drive to the parent loop now that drops off and in the front picks up in the front so just to try to keep people off backing up off the street like it does now and then a lot of repairs to through the pavement and expanding that west slot as well and this is just um really just talking about you know focusing on the elementary environment like parkside using these principles so it'll be kind of our guiding principles as we do that and working with staff there and just some things that you know as we look at what is you know what are we doing different now what's you know why is the classroom different um and it's just how you do it it's a you know inquiry-based we call inquiry-based classroom it's no longer each teacher has their own classroom and you know they more they can work together more kids can work together uh more great things that can be achieved and so it's kind of exploring that with with the staff of you know student choice student-centered uh student director instead of teacher directed and so that's when you know students will their educational will be more value when they they're forced to make a decision they're not told what chair to set in or you know what to do every day when they have to make that choice then that that helps them so just some of the new trends we see out there and schools are doing and it's really making a difference so just kind of the for parkside schmidt those can be kind of lumped together a little bit because of the mechanical replacement supposed to you've got an approval process to go through with all the hearings chat talked about and after that's approved we kind of get going with schematic design design development construction documents hopefully bidding late next year or early in early spring and then construction probably about two years of parkside or one summer through the next summer to achieve that schmidt probably a little bit different and some of these may adjust one of the challenges we're having right now is lead time on material deliveries um just some things are maybe 40 weeks out once you order this kind of crazy world we live in hopefully things will settle down here this this fall and we'll start to see that shorten but it requires a lot more planning up front to just make sure that when you start construction you can actually do construction and then lastly our net lastly the roofing replacements um the information services center by north high school clifty creek the entire roof and smith the partial roof which is really the addition that was put on the south half there and then solar arrays at parkside after we get kind of the last step of that project is to put them on the lower roof there so they're not as visible and then the last part is the softball baseball stadium piece at east several years ago we did new softball baseball fields for north and they typically use the field at clifty creek park now east has always used a parks department field there it's one of the ones in the quad as their varsity field never really have their own field so this is an opportunity to do that baseball you've always had a field there it's just never been up to the level of what we were able to do for north so this is bringing them up to that level as well the stanza east on the what used to be the home side now the visitor's side are pretty far out of code compliance and are you know getting via a safety issue are not ada accessible so it's replacing those which we've had on the list for i think six seven years probably and then the visitor side restroom concession to get that to work with softball baseball and the visitor side to make improvements to it or even replace it at this point with this age and then just some general improvements with fencing pathways things like that that are turing at this site so you kind of see the this work so that's the current east girls varsity softball field again it's it's not your guy's possession what the proposal is is we've missed dr bozen has been talking to parks department they're willing to give up this little league field here and let that become a varsity softball field for you guys so there'll be you know dugouts and press box and very much similar to to what the north fields are there along with improvements to to the north field adjacent to it as well as the bleacher replacement so that's kind of the scope of the work at this site we have 2.9 million dollars maybe not quite enough to do everything but we'll be close we'll see and that's that final slide of each each project and where the dollars are coming from and then what the what the totals are so from um from bond projects uh 13.4 million from the vab 2.9 and then the kerastacking dollars are 6.9 million that have been designated so a total of 23.215 but again only 13.45 through 415 is what the district is will be asking for in bonds so kind of next steps is all those hearings that that chad talked about um i think with which your board's approval will be the first hearing will be the next board uh august 9th the second hearing on august 23rd nowadays we require two hearings with anything over that's an uncontrolled project um and then if it's approved then build a corporation formula and then i think the idea for chad is to sell bonds prior to the end this year i believe they get that right i couldn't hear you sorry to sell bonds prior before the end of the year is that you'll probably try to in november november okay so that was a lot thank you very much and um i don't so you all tell me what kind of questions you have for those of us who have been through this process i do have an appreciation for um we we have consistently been very thorough in what in my opinion in how we've monitored all of our facilities every four years and gotten the red green and yellow little circles um in great detail so we have a great history of staying on top of all that and also being proactive rather than waiting for everything to fall apart and then we have a disaster on our hands so um i do appreciate that and i appreciate how thorough that you were but i do also appreciate colleagues who've never seen all of this before and you might have some questions so please do ask um so that you're comfortable with where we're at i do have a question just given recent events in in florida and you know us all feeling like the importance of structural integrity of our buildings and assessment of such as is a value how do we how do we assess the structural integrity of our of our buildings we're talking about a lot about purpose and use and things like that but in terms of safety of the structure we do look at things i mean there's there's the the structural part somewhat harder but you know we listen to principles that they say well something's squeaking or you know you'll there's be some telltale signs if something's our and there have been some you know mount healthy is a good example of a building that had to be come in and had to do extra shoring on because there were some walls that really were failing that were pulling apart from the roof and so things a lot of things like that we can see sometimes things are above ceilings and we can so it's kind of a you know relying on some of the staff and the custodians are actually the best resource we have at the buildings we love to talk to but we look at the exterior too we'll look at brick and things like that we can see visually walk around the outside of the building so any indications like that we see i mean there's you know currently there's an issue at mount healthy toward the back there's one at clifty creek again toward the back someplace nobody ever sees but you know something has been monitored and investigators looked at things and you know some of it's morally mostly cosmetic but you still want to keep an eye on stuff like that thank you thank you for that mr stenner yeah the hvac seems to be a big part of the project needs uh schmidt and parkside i think you referenced can you describe for me how the interaction between a boiler a chiller and the classroom units that we've got now and i think you said that at some schools we've already traded out one flavor one kind of a classroom ventilator unit for another one yeah we had good experience with that and are we are we learning as we go um yeah we have an important question there what history has taught us that when you see the horizontal unit ventilators kind of the low ones along the window typically those are um they're getting hot and cold water to run them from another from the boiler chiller that you reference so there's piping that goes throughout the building that supplies those what those units are are notoriously bad at they're one they're they're noisy um they don't they don't last very long they have a fairly short life spikel they don't humidify well because the air there's not enough air travel in them to kind of wring out any moisture especially in like a summer day or something and then and then they're throwing all the air from one spot and returning it back to that spot so what some of the changes are some is just you know innovations and newer technology and the system we have there actually was put in columbus north high school which is a vertical unit that is it's you know if you'll see it it's probably about three foot four square and it goes kind of all the way to the ceiling what you don't see is there's duct work then that goes above the ceiling and it supplies its air usually in four diffusers to a classroom so it's dispersing the air more you know regularly around the room so it's not trying to blow it all from one location so therefore you get it's a lot quieter it's also because it's taller it's got some different coils in it that can has a you know dehumidification cycle and other things that can take the outside air and deal with it in a much better way before it gets to the occupants of the room are uh filters how are the filters in those systems and there are filters and there there's a door that you have to be changed every year we're thinking about kovid 19 and trapping microbes or mm-hmm and those are you can put different levels of filters in them there's um different um how much they filter out so um and then kind of the good things about those with cobot is that they're bringing in their own outside air and they're taking blowing the you know other air they take out the classroom outside they're not mixing it with other classrooms so in that respect it's a lot of the other systems you know in some of the buildings are where there's an air handler back here and it supplies air to you know 12 classrooms and then returns the air from those 12 classrooms back to it and then um you know re-gets it or cools it and sends it back and it rejects some outside but not all and i think some of the things they've done here is you can reject more air outside or all of it and then bring in more fresh air but then you have to heat and cool so that costs you more more more dollars but that's what a lot of people have done during coba with those type systems thank you all right other questions thank you for that all right well thank you very much for all that presentation and we'll be hearing tons more for five to six meetings immediately and i'm sure a whole lot more detail as we go forward so thank you very much thank you all right we're to the how with dr roberts thank you dr thank you mr funk for that presentation it's clear that jim has a good understanding of our facilities and just a reminder we have 21 buildings in our school corporation and looking at the elementary school for example i think our youngest one is 1982 or three something like that is a new building so we constantly have renovations and improvements and adjustments to make so we appreciate jim dr bozeman and others being on top of that trying to figure out how to make sure and balance out those needs so my request for approval tonight starts off with minutes of the regular school board meeting from june 14th that is our last meeting as well as approval for the supplemental contracts that you had in your packet we also have field trips and professional leaves that are that are included school fundraisers as well and these are all just typical items that are in your packet as we roll through and as are the claims and payroll so for letter e here we you had two sets of claims one dated july 19th today of a little over 3.2 million dollars and then a pre-run that covered the entire month of june that was almost 16 million dollars additionally you have payroll that runs from june 7th through july 11th that was the last payroll uh date actually paid then last week that total was about five million dollars you see the notes there for both the june 18th one as well as the july 2nd that ju made adjustments and why they were the numbers that they were and then the last two items so you have the reopening plan that i have recommended to you as well as an adjustment of school meal prices that came after some federal adjustments were made for adult meal prices specifically so that is only an adjustment to adult meal prices uh from the last meeting that we or the last time that you approved those those those dollars so those are the items that i have for you to consider for approval this evening you very much so do i have a motion for approval of items for a through g as they've been presented to us so move thank you mr brian is there a second second thank you dr bills are there questions that individuals have of these items that have been presented to us i i do have one follow-up question just you know obviously the question of the safety of our elementary kids at this point is really the item on the table and do you see anything even within the current plan of making it a recommendation that could accommodate or facilitate parents who are concerned and and would like to mask their kids and and maybe helping them feel more at ease with the environment that they could be in within the schools so i think if i understand your questions wilton it would be given the current recommendation of mass optional is is there something that could be added to the plan that would make those who are concerned about the 2 to 11 year old group feel more comfortable it's a tough question because you know by going with with optional through those ages it leaves that group too to choose the option of to mask or not i listed the option earlier of having and i know that's not the greatest situation but we've tried to make sure and have another option in terms of schooling with the virtual option available um the additional thing that that was referenced was in terms of potential spread in trying to stay on top of our circumstances and situations and as circumstances it might dictate and and staying in contact with those who we regularly communicate with making adjustments for changes to that um i had heard you know thrown around um in prior conversations so this evening we've had a lot is is something that would um establish a date you know time frame you know we we start this way and we we do that for x number of weeks and and and perhaps we we go to something else i think that we we do that anyway and without setting up a specific time frame to anything three weeks nine weeks or something like that by our weekly review and staying on top of the information again remaining agile i i'm not in my my position not prepared to change the recommendation to to requiring ages two to eleven and i think that that that would be the thing that would make those offering concerns the most comfortable and and i don't know of a different thing besides what i've added that that bridges that gap between what we're trying to do here and then completely going to two to 11 being required dr shed yes dr roberts um i think the thing that you know listening and reading through the a lot of emails of you know we have parents that are pro mask for our 2 to 12 year olds and we have parents that are against all masks we have parents that are pro vaccines we have parents against vaccines and i you know i i understand the concern you know out of um you know my kids um i have one that will not be getting the vaccine um just because it's a female and there's still you know some information out there that is a concern however you know it's one of those as a parent and that she is older um i respect that but it's also one of those that she is doing a lot of research i think what's what's hard is being a public school is that as parents you know at the last school board meeting we had several speak that these are their kids how dare we tell parents what we can and can't do with their kids you know and i get that um you know but i also understand in in you know having my kids in school and everything that there are kids that have challenging homes that their parents maybe are working two and three jobs they're not able to monitor their kids health you know and i'll throw it out there because i know you know people just i've heard it said that the school is kind of a daycare for working parents you know i understand that you know i worked a full-time job and my husband worked shift so it you know there were days that if i had a meeting up in indy i couldn't skip out my meeting i had a sick kid and my parents weren't able to bail me out so that was put me in a tough tough position i'm really torn at this because you know it is the parents right and i guess because the way the plan is written and i appreciate dr iorio's uh comments because you know i do know the influenza and the rsv um has in the past been a big you know we have more people die of the flu in years past and then we have the mass mandate and then you didn't hear anything about people dying of the flu we were all dying of covet so you know i don't know you know and i'm not a medical person whatsoever but it's also one of those that it is a parent's right but i also know that we provide a facility and staff and we have to protect our staff we have to protect you know one of our our high expectations is you know objectives is keeping a safe environment for our children you know all children so i just want to say to the parents that you know i do understand and i tell you if i had kids in you know i have grandkids i have two grandkids that's in elementary right now here in bcsc and i have four up in lafayette um they are wearing masks regardless so it's one of those i think it is the parents choice we we did offer that choice you know and i think you know to allow those parents to make up their minds what is right for their child until their child turns 18 and becomes an adult i think that's the right thing for us to do and so looking at the plan and having the mask being optional for elementary i feel it's the right thing to do but i just hope and encourage parents if your kid's sick or not feeling right please keep them home or send them to school with a mask you know there's a fine line and i think sometimes you know we do have to watch that fine line on you know we just tell you know people that you know there's a virtual which i agree i'm on some online classes right now and it is not working for me i'm on the struggle bus with that but so i can't imagine younger kids and stuff so um so i think you know i just wanted to kind of throw that out there that i believe it is the parents rights as far as what they do with their kids but they have to understand and and our community needs to understand that if it's right for them if it's right for their kids then i think you know and i hope our physicians as they have been kind of pushing you know as soon as vaccines become available you know get vaccinated if that's the right thing to do for you and your family thank you mister hoftwire are there other comments other questions okay i will call the questions all those in favor of items four a through g as they've been presented to us if you'd signify by saying aye aye [Music] those opposed all right dr roberts those have passed unanimously thank you dr dr pleek is next on our agenda good evening good evening good evening hello okay i request approval of the hr recommendations as presented in your board packet as well as a sheet was placed next to your seats with two additions we would like approval of as well thank you thank you very much do i have a motion for approval of the human resource recommendations that have been presented to us so moved thank you miss wilden is there a second second thank you mr grimes any questions for dr pleek yes i'd ask just generally as we're getting closer to the start of school how are we doing on recruiting empty positions full positions we are doing the best we can we approximately have about 12 open teaching positions to fill we are confident this will occur we've already hired how many we've hired 93.
wow all right all of those in favor of the human resource recommendations as presented to us if you'd signify by saying i i those opposed all right you have them announce unanimously and we always try to end our meetings with the opportunity for board members to share their comments their reflections on our meeting today things that we've heard i'll turn to mr grimes um he seemed to be kind of a popular topic uh this evening so and he took off before i had a chance to say anything to him but just a couple things about tucker smith the north shot putter i don't know how many of you saw in the republic but when he was highlighted one week as the republic male athlete of the week um he was asked about his pre-meat routine and he i think semi-jokingly maybe said that it was uh his preparation was downing uh three cans of chef boyardee spaghetti and meatballs and then later on in another uh republic article after he broke the all-time state record of which he he's a very humble guy he is aiming for the national record next year he he was asked you know how he celebrated that evening after breaking the state record and he said he went home and downed about three cans of chef boy rd sauce but uh you could tell you i mean he's a workaholic and has a great sense of humor but uh on a serious note um i would like to offer a sincere thanks to all of you that were here this evening and i know many of you that are here also sent emails over the course of the last month or so your your input is is welcomed and valued and while i'm kind of still a rookie here on the board seven months in i very quickly have come to realize that seldom or probably never is is a key word here we will will we make decisions that will ever please everyone particularly on the larger more emotional issues and but i also know that um the more that we hear from stakeholders and community members the more informed decisions that we can make so sincere thank you for being here your emails your input all very welcome thank you thank you mr grimes ms wilden i agree with mr grimes in terms of the input is one thing that was pointed out to several of us on the board multiple times was our board member ethics okay this was referenced several times actually printed it out so i could read through what is my obligation as a board member like mr grimes i'm new i want to make sure i'm doing my job okay the first thing on here is thinking always in terms of children first children first and really the rest of it kind of irrelevant in in some regards okay um so so that is the lens by which i voted tonight i think that kids need to be in school i really do um however um i'm worried okay you can probably hear it in my voice if i see it in my expressions tonight i'm worried um the logic that that the administration has presented in terms of how we arrived at this decision is very important to me and i think the logic by which we will change it again because i think it will change again you know one direction or another is also important to me so i just uh just to to get to that answer quickly if we think back to march 1st 2020 i don't know if any of us would have said within a month we would have essentially shut down all manufacturing facilities within the county and within 20 days of that okay so it it changes just that just that quickly and so we need to be prepared for that and agility is important um because we don't want to wait and put put our kids at risk so thank you i know this was not a decision that you all came to lately thank you is stay health fire i think i've expressed my thoughts on this so thank you all right thank you mr stenner uh nothing to add to the comments that have already been made thank you dr bills nothing else to add to ms weldon and mr grimes comments all right thank you mr bryant i would like to thank all the parents and everyone that came up and spoke and yes you know we are concerned i know this wasn't an easy thing for us to do of coming up with some type of plan that's going to help and serve everyone and we know that but we have to do something the gentleman was talking about that we need our kids in school yes we do now uh we don't want to shut down our schools we don't want to have our kids sick so we're going to do the best we can and look at the things that uh put the force and go from there and the other thing if that young gentleman keeps chef boyardee they're going to stay and visit for a long time okay i will say too i thank you all very very much for taking your evening to be here for taking the time that you've taken to offer us comments in your emails to all of us they mean a great deal to us and i and i appreciate that you had the opportunity to experience this evening what all the issues that go into presenting a great school for all of your learners you've got to hear our financial reports we are very proactive we are a healthy financial school corporation that cannot be said for many in the state of indiana we are being very proactive about our facilities taking the best advantage of all that's being offered to us at the federal and state and local levels to be sure we are offering the very best facilities and you are all gracious enough to support our referendum that we are doing the very best that you have the very best teachers and staff for your children all the time and safety is an equal their health is very important to us as we have said at very many meetings we are one of the few school corporations that has a nurse in every building and that's important that we're always mindful of taking care of your children so thank you for what you share with us that we're doing our job well i'm very appreciative and very proud of this school corporation because we remain being very proactive and thoughtful and doing the very best for your children so thank you for that dr roberts i have nothing else to add dr shed thank you thank you all very much please be safe going home enjoy this beautiful week that we have ahead this meeting is adjourned
order so we could get started on time at 6 30. um [Music] so may we have the roll call please brown is here mr stewalis here mrs galbraith here dr hall mrs walters here vice president group here president albert i'd say brown right all right thank you can we please stand for the pledge mr sawalis will you please read the mission statement yes our mission statement is to empower each student to positively impact the world for a bright new future okay thank you um as people are coming in i just want one last reminder that if you want to make a public comment there is a form we're giving a little a little grace but if you um are finishing it up get it into terry as soon as possible okay so may i please have a motion to open the public hearing on return to in-person learning and continuity of services public hearing sr-3 all right so we were moved by galbraith i say it right janine and second by walters whenever you're ready brown is an eye mr sawalis hi mrs walters aye mrs galbraith aye vice president rue aye okay i see mrs perkins is all all set to go there testing but [Music] good evening to our board of education dr cara coghlinis to our community and staff school will look quite different this fall but our focus remains the same every student will receive a high quality education we will return to in-person learning this fall five days a week prioritize our health and safety of our students and staff following the guidelines of the illinois department of health and education cdc and isbee colvit19 has greatly impacted the lives of our students teachers and families cm 201u will continue to seek ways to help students families and educators with their social emotional supports and missing social interactions we will measure where students are academically to support and advance their learning and their experiences we will continue to communicate communicate with our families and staff as part of our listening to all stakeholders the esser 3 compliance we will hold this public hearing following the presentation of returning to learning and continuity of services in our plan we will follow up with an emergency operations plan which will give more details on the preventive strategies furthermore a detailed reference guide will be posted to the website which will give more detailed information in august that's all right so when you see me raise my hand that's that's the time too far what we know and what we have learned through isbee is this takes a coordination and collaboration across all district department schools and the board of education again the decisions that we make are carefully considered and the recommendations reviewed by the district which relies on the best medical practices released by cdc and the state of illinois according to isbee we will have a two to three year gap of efforts to close any gaps that we have and we are going to provide extraordinary supports to close the gaps caused by coding for further directions are forthcoming as we look into new maintenance and requirements of esther esser3 funding students will benefit from in-person learning and safely returning to in-person is our priority for 2021 in the timeline here we have our public hearing and comments this evening at our regular board meeting we have coming up in august our new higher orientation pd for our certified staff back to school night is on august 16th for k-5 and then we have our institute days for all staff on the 16th and 17th with the first day of opening of schools this year being august 18th pre-k 8 and then on the first day we will have freshmen only and everyone else will follow in may isbe unanimously passed a resolution to support the reopening of schools for the fall the policy will go into a declaration from the superintendent of the state dr ayala which will come into effect soon and we will get a copy of that declaration in that declaration it will be resolved that the state of illinois will return to in-person learning five days a week and offer remote instruction as by the state for any students who are unable to be quarantined and under the age of 12.
the district is putting in prevention strategies to help open the district up as safely as we possibly can and to reduce the risk of staff and students and the spreading of covet 19 in schools again the health and safety of students families and the education of our students are the top priority as we make the decisions to reopen schools this chart shows the mitigation strategies that are going to be in place in the areas where we are going to put the attention to we realize that we are going to have challenges that need to be addressed and we are addressing those as more information comes in there are challenges with masking there are challenges with social distancy contact tracing quarantine and testing covet testing again the health and safety of students families and educators are our top are in our top decisions as we reopen schools i am going to have nurse kate come up and talk about what testing cova testing in schools looks like thank you miss perkins try and make that work okay so um right now isbe and idph are working to bring three testing options to every district to help quickly identify any students that could potentially have coved start any of the quarantine isolation process as quickly as possible possible to limit the spread so the three options available is having a weekly testing program for any students that parents gave consent for that be weekly through a third party uh the other one is for the district to do the testing themselves with within our own staff and then an emergency outbreak testing which is where we are leaning towards right now and that is just to implement a testing on it twice twice a week for four weeks on any students that were identified within a cluster of an outbreak or within a classroom close contact to eliminate the need for further quarantining so this would be done right now through the shield program and shield says that they would be able to provide the staff to do the testing so we do have two tests available currently to the schools and that is the shield versus the bionx now um shield is the one that was used at u of i with their students it's the saliva test where they just spit into a tube that ends up getting sent out to the lab they run the test they give us the results within 24 hours and that one is the gold standard as we call the the rt pcr test so that's actually a diagnostic test that gets run through the lab the bionx now is a rapid test that's an antigen test so it's just detecting the actual antigen the thing that making you know the illness it is not necessarily diagnostic and further testing could be recommended through an rt pcr which would still result in a student having to go home until they were able to get the test on their own so that's just kind of a brief synopsis of what we're working with we're still waiting for a lot more guidance from idph to determine what are the recourses based on each of these tests and how we would have to move accordingly from there questions so as a requirement of the sr-3 funds we have to discuss how we are spending those funds as we are reopening schools so it was established as part of the cares act and the funds are distributed through isb as we present this evening you'll see that we have opportunities to address learning laws but also move our students forward forward we will focus on the academic and social emotional health of our students and a safe and healthy in-person learning environment we will also look at emphasizing our students and subgroups that are affected like children with disabilities ell and homeless this chart shows how we are blending funds that we have through title and other grants that we receive like the after school programs grant as well as the esser funds and the percentages of what we are spending from summer learning over the next three years to professional development high impact tutoring again the learning loss social emotional needs and operational needs due to covet one of the things that we know that we need to help support our students is the ability to have human capacity and the number of team members that wrap themselves around our students and we are proud to say that we have partnership developed a partnership continued our partnership rather with governor state university where we have teachers in transit transition to teaching and each school will have at least two individuals to help support the learning facilitated by the principles of those buildings in order to help with the learning laws we are also required to make sure that we have a continuity of services and that we again continue to address the academic needs of our students their emotional needs their mental health and other needs that our students have because of the pandemic and so in the reference guide that will go up in august you will have we will have detailed information on how all of the departments will work in that capacity so what to expect by all grade levels when we return early learning center students will be wearing masks taking maths break plans have been established our pre-k program will run the full engagement we will return to specials including pe we will continue to use technology we will limit furniture in order to maximize social distancing and then we will blend the lessons learned that were pre-coveted and covet lessons we learned during covet again to make sure that we are creating a safe respectful learning environment so that we can continue to engage our students that does not look very different from our elementary middle school and high school here it describes again wearing events taking a break with maths with an established plan students fully engaged in all content areas including all of their core subjects and specials changing rooms using lockers again we will have some things that are are different protocols and keeping social distancing as much as we possibly can but giving them access to their learning experience again blending best practices that we know from pre-covert and coding with the continuity of service we want to make sure that principals are working with their staff in collaboration our academics our core academics will be strong principals will work with their staff in increasing the collaboration as well as best practices with instructional practices as well as a multitude of assessments and continuing to work on social emotional and that again it looks a little different at every level from elementary to middle school and high school and that is posted on the website so isb declared when they made the declaration the resolution all students 11 and under have access to instructional learning if they are quarantined because they have not had an opportunity to be vaccinated however in pre-money 201u all students k-12 will benefit from having access to stream learning instruction and what that looks like for us is that teachers will live stream with students under quarantine so students have to be under 11 or it would be for us i'm sorry all students but they have to be quarantined and nurse kate will work with families and buildings on what the quarantining looks like students will participate as observers in our streaming program all students who are also medically compromised could meet the criteria for homebound instruction details on the the details of this will be put in our guidance document here is a draft of that plan and we are working with our memberships to finalize what this plan looks like at the pre-k level if we have students who are sick quarantine or homebound we from our lessons learned we know that they will do better with packets and the support of their parents and we will give them instruction that is developmentally appropriate for them students who are sick for the day or you know are out for a couple of days the work will look as it has always that they will have time to make up those assignments and work with their classroom teachers in our streaming instruction design we again will tease out what the details of that are but it offers teachers to give real lifetime instruction broadcasting live and students would view and observe from home they will not be active participants however they will be able to ask questions of their teachers and then get support at some time during the day to help support them with any questions that they have additionally we are putting in virtual academic learning labs so that those students can have some after school tutoring and and work with assignments at each grade level it looks different but it will be available for all of our students from grades k to 12.
and then we have our students who are medically compromised that would could qualify for five hours of instruction per week and again the last chart here table here shows that the virtual academic labs will be open from 4 30 to 6 30 daily and would run remotely with certified staff supporting the needs of those students that closes the presentation here and then mrs roop do you open it up for public comment yes unless there are any uh questions from the board i just wanted to be clear so the only option for streaming or any type of remote learning is for students that are quarantined under this plan that is correct okay does anyone else have a question or comment yeah i do have a question just on that same note i'm i'm a little unclear about who justify a student being quarantined is it the school district or the student parent so we would we would follow the same guidelines that we followed during the pandemic last year which was the call goes to nurse kate whether it generates the principal colleen nurse kate the parent calling nurse kate and then nurse kate goes through her protocols and the notification goes to the principal the teacher the nurse at the school site so there are protocols in place for to determine who is quarantined and who does not get quarantined okay you know that students that are not vaccinated nurse can correct me if i'm wrong do not have to be quarantined is that correct if they come in close contact asymptomatic okay on that note so if a student is deemed to be quarantined they will get the screaming learning right correct but a student that's sick and not able to attend regular school setting they will get a different type of learning e-learning right well it's not e-learning those students it would be pre-pandemic and you missed a day of school then you get your assignment from your teacher the next day when you return or you know if you're lucky enough your brother or sister brings it home to you okay i guess my question is well my other question is why is it such a disparity in the type of learning between a young student that's ill and one that's quarantined that's i'm just kind of having a little uncertainty uncertainty about how those two jive together or not jive together just a little not clear on that well i think that quarantine offers an opportunity for students who have a student can be quarantined up to i believe 10 days and maybe even longer and so it gives them an opportunity to not lose 10 days of learning versus you're out for a day and the planning that has to go into getting our quarantine students ready for 10 days of not being in school and those quarantined students are not seen as being absent right we are waiting on the definition of how that is to be coded from the state they usually at this time and we're still attending our weekly meetings with um isbee and cdc and idph and all the other agencies but they will give us guidance on how we are to record them and usually they come up with some funky code that they are quarantined but they are working streaming remotely whatever it is so they give us coding of how we're supposed to record their absence okay thank you dr cogwinnis and your staff for really putting a lot of effort into this process appreciate it ms perkins one quick question um it says return to in-person pe what is that gonna look like in regards to masking we as far as i know we are requiring masking unless that that changes but as far as i know we are requiring masks we are looking at social distancing um and and we have talked about um as much outdoor activities as we possibly can okay at least for the time being thank you okay anything else okay thank you mrs perkins thank you all right that takes us to the public comment portion and these cup public comments are just on the topic of the public hearing which is basically all the public comments that we have um we have several in person and several written we are going to start with the in person so when i call you up you can come up to the podium we're going to start with sarah valerio the topic is reopening plan good evening everyone my name is sarah valerio and i have been at the high school as a teacher for the past 18 years first i'd like to start off by saying how proud i am to work at 201u especially from march 2020 to this past june the way our district handled the pandemic was by far superior to other districts the students worked hard and the teachers worked hard every day teachers had to think outside of the box then when we went to teaching online and in person we continued to think outside the box i can honestly say that last year was by far the hardest i have ever worked in the last 18 years teaching online and teaching in person is hard it is hard physically mentally and emotionally i came here tonight to speak about the reopening plan for the fall my major concern is in regards to live streaming as i stated before teaching online and in person at the same time is very difficult i know it took a toll on me and it took a toll on my colleagues i went into teaching to interact with my students to be in the classroom with them and teaching both in person and online forced me to sit at my desk i want to be engaged with the kids in their learning live streaming poses a few problems and i want to speak about those problems at the high school level first hour at the high school starts at 7 25.
if we're required to live stream for quarantine students that would mean i need to know who is quarantined by 7 25 every morning parents at the high school have 48 hours to get an absence excused for their students a student could be absent on monday and the parent can get it excused on tuesday or wednesday that being said i would have to live stream every single day every single class because i don't know who was quarantined that day a second problem with live streaming is students who choose not to come to school that day when hybrid started i had on average seven to eight kids in person in each class as the weeks went by that number started to decrease significantly some students said that they would stay home because they knew the classes would be live streamed some said they were exposed to covid some were sick with another illness and some just wanted to stay home a third problem i see with live streaming is that will force me to split my time between the in-person kids and the kids online i will be tied again to my desk and if the answer is that students online will be muted and just watch that is not realistic if a student online needs something i will definitely not ignore them i can't ignore them one sector will be compromised the online or the in-person kits i encourage the district to reconsider live streaming a solution instead of live streaming would be to treat the absence or quarantine as we did last year if a kid missed a day for a doctor's appointment or just because they were sick with some other illness we posted their assignment to google classroom and that's what the students know and that's what they are used to this worked last year thank you for your time thank you thank you and sarah you did a great job but i failed to say before that that we are limiting everybody to five minutes that's kind of our our limit so thank you for that um next up we have kathy seifert talking about cmea concerns good evening i'm kathy seifert president of cmea i'm here this evening to share concerns with the district's reopening plan on behalf of our membership before i begin i did send an email to all of our board members and our cabinet members just with some things that i'm going to reference here so you have some data points and some other information to reference i'd like to start and kind of echo what sarah said that throughout the pandemic we've met with our administration every two weeks to address questions and concerns at our final meeting of last school year we discussed this upcoming school year we all agreed that asking teachers to lead instruction for in-person and remote students simultaneously was not effective we also shared our concerns with masks in our non-air-conditioned spaces which as you know was the majority of our school buildings in my four years as president the working conditions and our non-air conditioned buildings have been the top concern we were fortunate last school year to have several remote learning days for the students and staff in those buildings i met with administration last week where they shared the highlights of the reopening plan and to be honest i was caught off guard to learn that our teachers would be expected to stream instruction for quarantined students since we all had previously agreed this was not an effective instructional strategy when i questioned why we didn't hire any additional guest teachers or even short-term instructional staff i was told there simply aren't people applying for positions the reality is that we never posted these positions after our membership had an opportunity to review the plan we pulled them 92 percent of our teachers are opposed to streaming their class for quarantined students now to the non-teaching audience it might seem really simple to turn on a camera and stream your class but in reality it's a lot more work for the teacher teachers have to set the stream up ahead of time they have to be notified of who the quarantine students are they have to contact those students to share the link and what time that's going to start they have to respond to any questions via email for those students they also need to make sure that work is getting completed during those 10 days and then also stay in contact with our parents and we learned last year managing at home students is incredibly time consuming and let's not forget that's also on top of our in-person students and attempting to make up for learning loss our younger students present a different challenge many of our primary teachers are going to be moving away from chromebook-based assignments and back to paper and pencil to work on basic skills like writing cutting and pasting in the event a student has to quarantine the teacher would have to create an entirely different lesson plan for those students i asked this question last evening in a meeting that we had with administration and i'm going to ask it again if we are going to move forward with asking teachers to lead instruction for quarantine students then what are we taking off their plate to ensure they have the time to meet the needs of all students and if we're not taking things off their plate then how are we compensating them for the time that they're working outside of their contractual hours we've worked countless hours outside of our contractual time last year and a portion of the year before and we haven't asked for anything in return we won't continue to do that this year we did discuss this topic at length and i know ms perkins talked about the the learning labs but again we have to find people that are willing to do that and i made our stance clear that our association simply does not see this streaming option as acceptable this is one of the reasons why there's a teacher shortage we keep piling onto the plate of our teachers and we're not taking anything off and we're not giving them any additional compensation when we talk about emergency funding that can be used for staff matson right down the road gave their teachers a fifteen hundred dollar stipend to acknowledge their work and sacrifice throughout the pandemic other districts like frankfurt 157c are hiring short-term teachers to lead any quarantine students in grades k-5 our teachers have done the heavy lifting since march 2020.
we want what's best for our students but that also means that we need to do what's best for our teachers managing the instruction for two student groups is not in the best interest of our students or teachers we just want to be heard and i hope you listen thank you thank you [Applause] thank you so much all right next up we have another teacher julie pappas talking about reopening teacher view [Music] i am julie pappas i'm an eighth grade teacher at crete monee middle school starting my sixth year in the district my 18th year of teaching i'm genuinely proud to call this district my home when i returned to the classroom six years ago after teaching uh for olivet online actually ironically create money was the only school that i applied to six years have passed and i'm still so incredibly happy to be here every august i'm overcome with the excited yet nervous feeling teachers experience approaching a new year i am the nerd that gets excited in june i mean i have two weeks off and then i start thinking about what i want to do with my classroom and that's me so just so we know what kind of teacher i am i always think about what my journey is going to be what what are we going to learn from each other i think it's fair to say that even if i'm in my 18th year the honeymoon phase is not over i'm also the president of beecher school board i have been a unique asset to my community by being both a teacher and board member the advantage i bring to the board is my classroom experience which has allowed me to allow the other members to view the everyday occurrences teachers experience through a more direct lens during covid cremoni was used as my exemplar for results oriented oriented practice health and safety and the inclusion of faculty and staff in the decision making process i was very proud of my district i was always very happy feeling that the board and dr cara listened and discussed issues with our union president kathy seifert resulting in a staff that felt supported respected and valued approaching the 2122 school year i expect nothing less i implore you board members and dr cara please listen to our teachers and staff please take our feelings and capabilities into consideration when you draft this final plan in beecher we discussed our plan as a board at our regularly scheduled meeting both the union and public had the opportunity to express their concerns and possible solutions to issues arising with the potential reopening plans being proposed the superintendent sent out a survey to community members giving them further opportunities to participate in the process the process in which this school board completed its reopening shows that they care about their employees students parents and community members so i'm pretty proud of the process that we have laid out together as with most schools in our area masks will be optional for vaccinated and unvaccinated all quarantined students will be treated as a typical absent student this plan is conducive in its consideration for both educators and community members in march the district urges employees both districts all districts to get vaccinated for the consideration for the well-being of all according to the cdc and idph individuals who are vaccinated should not be mandated to wear masks these are two agencies we look to for guidance throughout the entire pandemic please consider the experts at a time like this it's fair to assume that most of you with all due respect having sat in a full classroom at 90 degrees with kids and snot and everything i mean let's be honest right it's not realistic or even remotely healthy for our staff and students from a teacher i want you to try to imagine the emotional toll the last year and a half has taken we have been asked to do more as you can hear from what that we've ever been asked to do we rose to the occasion and did so without complaint we were all exhausted experiencing burnout and hopelessness by the end of the last school year even i was i mean i still got incited at the end of june but we were continuously told and believe that this year would we would experience a return to a more normal experience we took this summer to refresh rejuvenate and set our sights on the promise of a new year where we'd be the teachers we were once again that is until we received this news the fact that live stream has even been considered shows a complete disregard to the entire staff i would like to personally invite you to my classroom to witness what goes on into live streaming it sounds simple but as for a teacher like me i can't sit at my desk i have it set up so that the kids at home can can talk on the speaker so that the kids in class can talk on speaker and so that i can walk around the room and the kids can see me at all times plus share my screen at the same time and give individual attention it's a lot and that's in an 8th grade classroom i mean in a kindergarten classroom you're going to have the kids also showing their pets which is a whole nother thing we did it when it was completely necessary into the best of our ability but we were working two jobs to be completely honest hearing that we will be required to livestream our classes again immediately reignited the feelings of defeat dread and exhaustion last year ended with me being convinced we wouldn't have the same experience again i had to tell myself that for my own sanity i am not quite sure how we're going to begin another year with these requirements and expectations i'm begging all of you please listen to the teachers and reconsider this plan we need quality teachers in our district but with this disregard for our mental and physical limits i'm hesitant to believe we will continue to receive or employ quality teachers this announcement alone has made a great deal of us question returning next month live streaming does not have to happen we can find a plan that will still support the student but not push the teachers to our limits this can be problem solved per school for a way that can help students be successful and support the teachers please consider allowing this to be worked on without live streaming most districts in our area and those comparable to our district are not live streaming to quarantine students from all of my studying from isb and also asking multiple sources there is nothing that stipulates we are required to live stream for quarantine students there are other remote instruction options they will not be left behind the quarantine students are treated as absent students we want masks optional for those who are vaccinated and recommended for the rest we need quarantine students to be treated as absentees we need to come up with a plan for the quarantine students that does not include include live streaming we cannot be expected to continue this thank you [Applause] thank you all right next we have andrea kinnan on the topic of mask mandates thank you so much and good evening everyone my name is andrea canan and before i begin i just want to acknowledge with respect and i'm sorry you might have to be just a little louder thank you i just want to acknowledge with respect the comments before me i have sincere compassion for your concerns and i sincerely hope that all of you are heard i am a parent in the district and i wanted to discuss mass mandates upon returning in the fall on may 17th idph repealed the mask order in the state of illinois opening the door for persons of conscience to more freely exercise their rights under ilcs sections 5 through 12.
more recently the state of illinois has made mass optional for illinois schools and has left it up to individual districts to decide if reflecting the will of the public they serve is represented best by masking or becoming mask optional illinois high school sports central has compiled and is still compiling a list of ever increasing number of school illinois schools that will be returning to a learning mask optional in the fall as of last evening when i printed it it represented 132 districts and individual schools that are choosing to empower individuals to protect themselves in school the same way they choose to protect themselves outside of school with or without masks according to what they and their parent and guardians feel is best for them since that printing i have personally added four more illinois school districts to that list those being district 220 in barrington district district 200 and wheaton district 47 in crystal lake and homer 33c further there is proposed legislation hv 4083 co-sponsored by several state representatives proposing to quote amend the school code prohibit the state board of education school districts and elementary schools from requiring teachers other staff or students who are masked during the covet 19 public health emergency disaster declared by the governor pursuant to the illinois emergency management act effective immediately end quote our state wants to open up fully to all areas of our population and i'm speaking to implore you on behalf of those students and parents who do feel as i do and teachers as well and may not have the ability to stand up or speak out or be here tonight in re to return our students and teachers to a school in a manner that is fully mass optional all of us can cherry-pick these days from the science of our choice but the illinois right of conscience act prevents persons from having to engage in medical practices they find to be against their conscience illinois attorney thomas devore has supported this information from shelby county illinois that says while the rest of the economy has returned to normal children in schools have not been afforded the same opportunity already being pressured to acquire masks again this fall the illinois department of public health had repealed the mass mandate on may 17 and shortly thereafter the illinois state board of education had issued a guidance to schools that they should mask again in the fall there are several key problems with this ispe is not a law making or health governing body everything isp isbe does is controlled by state law 105 ilcs nothing in the state law gives ispe power over schools to require masks that is the freedom of the district issuing this guidance many months ahead of time implies it is not based on the metrics and guidance is not the same as law no laws have been changed for our legislator that allow isba to control masks there's plenty of data that suggests that mass may not be the best choice there is no data that supports that mass did anything to change the outcome in the schools whatever your thoughts may be on the matter as a district we have to respect the multitude of differing viewpoints present in the student body and standing community are the metrics in crete so different from those in homer glen wheaton barrington tinley park if so what is the specific threshold for when the masks come off and stay off what data is cited that lends the confidence to say that this district knows best what is one child what is best for one child or another or the population or a population of children more so than their parents and guardians do with each school deciding what is best for their own community why not leave it to each child each parent and i will add each teacher to decide what is best for themselves for their children and for their lives moving forward in this very unique world thank you so much for hearing me thank you for your comments okay the next public comment is carrian galagos reopening plan [Music] hi my name is carrie ann gallegos um i'm going to resist the urge to take this mask off to speak with you because we are not going to be doing that for our children we've been teaching this way for a long time and as you've noticed i'm sure it's difficult even for adults to do that we come to the microphone and we automatically take that mask off because we know it muffles our voice we know it's difficult to enunciate clear enough for you to be able to hear what we're saying that being said um i'm coming to you both as an educator and as a parent in the district the past year and a half have been very difficult for all of us i love this district um which is why i'm no longer just an educator i'm an educator and a parent here we moved here because i love what we do and i believe in what we do um i've been trying to maintain balance not wanting my child to end up in the hospital as many of my relatives did um at the same time socialization is very important at her age and so maintaining physical and emotional health during this time has not been anything easy to do we did the best we could and i'm very thankful to everybody involved for all the hard work that we've put in to finding a solution to every problem that we've run across last year the educators in this district showed flexibility again and again we adjusted to huge changes we managed our own chaotic lives while trying to guide our students through the chaos of a pandemic we changed course on the drop of a dime because that was what was needed of us our workloads became heavier in many cases we do this because we love what we do and we care about the children many of us were reluctant to move to hybrid to a hybrid model last year knowing that masks would be required when in person don't get me wrong i strongly believe that we should take precautions to protect the lives of our colleagues and our students however we knew that this was going to be a challenge it was going to be difficult to teach phonics to teach language through masks teaching anything is difficult this way as we cannot hear our students sometimes and sometimes they struggle to hear us we push through and we made it this far hoping that the pandemic was coming to an end the number of people vaccinated has gone up and we have watched the number of coveted cases decline unfortunately the numbers are increasing again in many places including illinois this puts us in a difficult position once again in this district we try to provide students with the best education possible this year we are being asked to teach students in person while live streaming how will we stream our classes to students at home when best practices tells us that teachers should be moving around the room not in one place how will we live stream activities where students in the classroom are actively engaged and the lesson is not taught primarily from the board what is the strategy that we will do to make sure that they're actually being able to receive the lesson lesson in the same way that the students that are in the classroom are receiving that lesson um without compromising the lesson that's being taught in the classroom we are essentially being asked to teach two classes at once it is impossible to give our full attention to the students in the classroom while simultaneously giving our full attention to students at home we already know that there's a teacher shortage and this is one of the reasons that we've been given as to why we're being expected to do this however being overloaded and not paid extra for the ever-growing workload is part of the reason why we have a teacher shortage in the first place i strongly believe that wearing masks is one way that we can protect each other from another way of covered related illness and death i myself am wearing willing to wear a mask in the classroom at the beginning of the school year knowing that it will make my job much harder at the same time i understand that some of my colleagues only teach students who are at an age where they can receive the vaccine 12 years and up i can see why mandatory masks would be frustrating to those teachers we are not all in the same situation and teachers want to teach in a way that will provide the best possible education for their students it is important for us to focus on the health and education of our students as well as the well-being of our staff my biggest concern is for my colleagues who teach in the elementary buildings without air conditioning their students will not be eligible to receive the vaccine yet so it is understandable why we want to protect them however the conditions of those buildings make mask wearing a bigger burden to them and their students than to anyone else having a space to cool down and take breaks for masks is inadequate frankly i'm not as at a loss as to how it is acceptable at all to have any buildings without air conditioning in 2021 regardless of the pandemic i would like to ask how we got to this place was the referendum the only way to get air sorry i tend to talk too much so i'm trying to try not to okay um so with the referendum the only way that we can get air into those buildings and if so why did it not pass was did we disseminate the information adequately do we not have a strong enough plan in place or more importantly how do we move forward from here how do we fix it so that our children and our staff are teaching in a building that is safe for them where they're not in 90 degree weather trying to breathe through a mask and trying to learn when they can't even focus so we have a dilemma one that we knew was coming how do we address it i really don't know i don't have the answers but i know that the current plan does not thank you [Applause] okay thank you and the last in-person comment is actually a question from tamika connor and it might have actually been answered in the presentation tamika did you still want to come up and it was actually all right okay thank you i appreciate that okay well thank you everybody that made an in-person public comment um someone has a hand up but we but i haven't heard nothing from the parents the last person came up and said we should protect our children however there's no however we're protecting children nobody here is going to go to one child's funeral if they die for coffee who is going to talk to their child when they go to school get covered give it to their grandparents they their grandparents pass away who's going to tell their child it wasn't your fault that you caught this and gave it to your grandparents nobody's talking about that well actually and we appreciate your comment um we do have several differing opinions in our written public comments that came in that we're going to go into right now so i think you will hear some other other sides of it yeah and that's what i'm going to do right now is start start reading all the written comments we got we got 13.
so um so here we go they're on both sides of the issue this first one is titled no masks optional at best by jim tenecott it says do the right thing no masks on our kids please follow along with many other districts in illinois the kids have suffered enough with this political theater for nearly two full school years lost don't make parents make the decision to send our monique children to other districts or private schools thank you the next one is um entitled covid19 hearing it says dear board of education i would like to provide data from the centers for disease control for the years 2020 2021 as of july 14th on covet desk for children ages 0 to 17 in illinois with our strict lockdown and masking policies there have been 11 deaths involving kovid please note the word involving which the cdc gives no explanation of what that means indiana has zero deaths involving covet 19 in the same age group with basically an open state michigan very similar to illinois restrictions some even more strict had zero deaths involving covet 19 for the same period this three-state data comparison tells me that illinois is quote cooking the books end quote on child deaths involving covet 19 which is not hard to believe with illinois's track record of political corruption in comparison child overdoses for youth 15 to 24 in 2019 which is the last dead on the website was four thousand seven hundred and seventy seven three thousand three eighteen for males one thousand four fifty nine for females and 109 alcohol overdoses deaths from influenza in illinois in the zero to 17 age group was 186 for the time frame 2020 to 2021.
will we quarantine students in contact with any child with the flu deaths from all other causes in youth 0 to 17 such as suicide car accidents murder child abuse etcetera was 1793 for the same time frame i could not find data on whether or not any covid 19 involved deaths were in children with underlying medical conditions i think you get the picture individual freedom is the bedrock of american democracy anytime we as citizens are willing to give up any of our individual freedoms we risk becoming another china or russia or vietnam or venezuela or cuba or any number of socialist or communist countries where individual freedom does not exist and those people live under tyranny i urge you to think hard and long when and if you try to limit any child or parent's individual rights for the so-called public good when the almighty data just proves the threat infinitesimal in fact far less dangerous than a child driving to school or crossing the sidewalk or playing on the playground by the way the data for young adults through 60 years of age in relative good health is very similar thank you michael turay senior all right the next one is entitled public comment just simply says i'm a parent of a student that will be going into the sixth grade i have concerns about her and all the classmates under the age of 12 who cannot get the vaccine i feel we should as parents have the choice of remote learning or in-person learning i don't feel safe letting her go into school unvaccinated and possibly bringing home something to myself her grandmother or possibly even my daughter getting sick if the school district would allow remote learning by our choice until the kids can get the vaccine and possibly review it after that i know the sentence wasn't that's how it's written and it's just a sincerely a concerned parent the next one is entitled 2021 policy it says hello i have some concerns about the 2021-22 school year i have heard some districts are requiring mask only if the students are vaccinated actually i think that's supposed to say unvaccinated i see many problems with this policy the main one is bullying i have witnessed this in adults and believe it will be worse for students kids will be shamed for not having the vaccine yelled at left out isolated it should be all or no one also i don't think the younger students should wear masks in many other states it is not required and the numbers have not gone up especially in pre-k k n1 also the staggered schedule did not work students were not keeping up on school work they missed out on a lot of activities and friendships were lost teachers were not keeping up with grades they seemed overwhelmed with the online work and only with a group of students one or two days a week i hope you will consider opening the schools completely no mass for the younger grades and either all or no mass for the older grades thank you and that's from kim lakowsky stewart the next one is entitled return to in-person learning it says we have three children in the district two of them are vaccinated the other is eight years old too young to be vaccinated it is not safe for unvaccinated people to be inside without wearing masks we think that it is best to offer a remote learning option for those who want it until all students have an opportunity to be vaccinated if the state will not allow that the policy should be that everyone wears masks indoors the cdc still recommends that all unvaccinated people remain mass while indoors the american academy of pediatrics recently recommended universal masking for everyone in schools because many students are not yet eligible to receive a vaccine and because enforcing a max requirement for unvaccinated people would be too difficult additionally kids should be allowed outside as much as possible including outdoor recess every day lunch will also be a problem as kids must remove their masks to eat so parents need to have the option to pick up their kids from school for lunch vaccines are working but not enough people are vaccinated yet the elementary and some middle school students don't even have the option to be vaccinated yet infection rates are getting worse again and will likely get worse in the fall and winter the virus is affecting children more than it has before if we don't take these precautions kids will get sick possibly seriously wearing masks indoors is an easy step that will greatly reduce the risk of kids getting covet and that's from matt and amy bartling and then i'm going to ask miss walters to read some more okay this next one is titled unmask our kids hello elected members of school board for 201u as you may be aware the cdc and idhp released their guidelines today regarding masking my child for school it seems like the guidelines have changed to put this decision to local school board school boards which is good news as i believe most of you would vote to have a mask optional school year for our kids also the language changed to recommended not required for the cdc guidelines i look forward to hearing 201 will be masked optional this year soon i assume the 7 20 board meeting and i'll pay for our school fees once it's official i will not have my child mast at school nor will i have them being discriminated against for their vaccination status this district was the only one in the area that did not return to full day last year enough is enough it is especially comical to consider mandatory mass as kids have been mask-free everywhere but school since may masks are not without consequence there needs to be a choice and that choice is for the parents to make sincerely miss broda okay the next one is reopening plan 21-22 school year good evening i'd like to start by saying thank you to everyone who truly went above and beyond last school year i know that it wasn't an easy task for teachers parents students etc but we all survived and made the best of a difficult year with that being said i would like to voice my concerns for the upcoming school year i'm not even going to touch the subject of masks because that is a battle no one will ever win people will be upset if masks are mandatory or up to parents to choose for their children my concern is with the elementary schools we are starting this year earlier than previous years our buildings that our youngest children occupy aren't air conditioned it's always a miserable first few weeks of school due to heat now we have a factor in masks etc what is the plan for excessive heat i don't feel that the year will start off on a positive note if we are having more remote days due to heat my next concern is for kindergarten students this is a huge transition for them majority of our kindergartners have missed an entire year of preschool due to this pandemic studies have shown that younger children do well with play-based learning will our kindergartners be able to be in a learning environment with plenty of time interacting with their peers or are we sending our children into a sterile cold environment with minimal play based learning activity centered etc in closing i'd like to say i don't envy any of you that have to make these decisions i am fully aware that there is a never there's never going to be a perfect plan that everyone is happy with or comfortable with i wish everyone a wonderful and healthy start to the 20 21 22 school year with minimal disruptions this school year thanks erin the next one says dear dr kara kaglinis and crete money school board 201u board members there is no doubt in my mind that there is division in the community the teachers the staff members the board members and parents of crete monee school district 201u when it comes to the health and safety guidelines in schools none of the decisions made in this area should be taken lightly especially by those making the decisions or refusing to the truth is that it is hard to believe that the community is large the community at large actually wants their children to go back to school with masks when they currently do not utilize masks in places like the local grocery store church walmart restaurants parks pretty much everywhere these children's are maskless and have been since school let out in june i'm asking that the school board promptly removed mandatory mask wearing for all children and staff of our schools and make mask optional this school year the mass mandate was lifted in the state of illinois it is unnecessary and not healthy to continue to require our children and school staff to wear masks at school or while participating in school activities it is our duty as adults to not only protect the younger generation but also do as much as possible to ensure that they thrive there is no statutory statutory law that mandates masks i am appalled at the guidance recently handed down from the illinois department of education that suggests things like keeping the youngest of our children in mass with the justification that they are ineligible to be vaccinated i am asking you to rise above this guidance that is clearly not what is best for our children i applaud other area schools for their mass optional plan that is being implemented this school year i believe parents families should be able to perform their own risk assessment considering all physical mental emotional and psychological risks and benefits for their own children when it comes to all medical decisions including masking i officially i officially and respectfully request you immediately make masking optional for all children and staff in our district and this is uh marie jarres oller okay the next one student face masks i think that it should be up to the parents to decide if they want their children to wear face masks data shows that infection from covet are very low among children and i feel that wearing them for six hours a day is abusive who knows what psychological issues will evolve from these kids constantly wearing masks in the classroom please leave it up to the parents to make that decision thank you for your time bobby walters and i'm turning it over to mrs galbraith okay mr smallish i've got one here from miss rhiann wary first i would like to thank the district for their work and difficult decision making that kept the district's students and families safe during the 2021 school year a big thank you to the teachers and staff my child's teachers miss ryan miss mcknight work tirelessly and with endless patients as they help their students and families navigate remote learning i appreciated the board using the data following the safety metrics from the state and county during last school year as we head into the 21-22 school year with vaccinations now available to some populations but not all the decisions are no less easier elementary students are still not eligible to receive the vaccines to those only 12 years and older we are also watching the highly contagious delta variant sweep through unvaccinated and low vaccinated areas and groups today the cdc says 83 percent of the sequence covet 19 cases are now the delta variant yesterday the academy of american pediatrics updated their recommendations for opening schools this fall quoted from the news release in addition to vaccinations the academy of american pediatrics recommends a layered approach to make schools safe for all students teachers and staff that included a recommendation that everyone older than age two wear masks regardless of vaccination status the academy of american pediatrics also amplifies the centers for disease control and prevention's recommendations for buildings ventilation testing quarantine cleaning and disinfecting in the updated guidance dr sara bode of the aap council on school health states there are many children and others who cannot be vaccinated this is why it's important to use every tool in our toolkit to safeguard children from covet 19.
universal masking is one of those tools and has been proven effective in protecting people against other respiratory diseases as well i think it's imperative the district continues to follow the data in science as we continue to work our way through this global pandemic optional masking for those unvaccinated is dangerous and as we watch the newest variant make its journey through our nation and hitting those most vulnerable vulnerable the cdc along with the illinois department of public health are still recommending masking and proper spacing for unvaccinated populations having the data and guidelines available the decision to continue masking in the elementary schools in elc should be an easy one brienne wary and i have one more hello my name is barb gerk and regarding the challenges we as a community face as we push through the phases of management of coven 19 i'd like to share some thoughts first please know how impressed i've been with the district as a whole our schools and the ones who lived in our homes last year our teachers my children had the chance to watch their teachers turn on their heels and change direction to respond to this pandemic the new classrooms were built in all of our homes and we all carried on i will never forget how these incredible teachers learned right along with our kids it taught our children by example to be lifelong learners thank you i'm a parent of three students in the district i am also a health care worker in the community and have had a unique opportunity to see many perspectives throughout this pandemic returning to a sense of normalcy is one of my hopes but returning carefully proactively and with a commitment to continue to make safe safety and priority is most important for a successful transition i am most concerned with the younger students who have not yet become vaccinated they are at higher risk for becoming ill and spreading the illness our area saw a high ratio of respiratory illness the winter of 2019 supposedly before covet 19 was identified in the united states my children told me that the most of their friends and teachers had been ill at some point while attending school all three of my children were diagnosed with pneumonia that winter and i do not want to see a repeat performance in any other school as a parent i know that i must keep my children home from school when they are sick i must have a plan a a plan b and even a plan c to make sure my children are attended to if they do get sick because my both my husband and i work full time i'm not sure all of us parents have a plan b or a plan c so children do go to school sick i have no statistics here but through observation it is clear that sick children in our district historically have been allowed to stay in the classroom exposing all their classmates and their teachers to illness and this needs to end the ripple effect of illness acquired in school is tremendous on my family my work and i know i'm not alone now that we as an entire district have the capacity to use remote options such as google classroom we need to use the technology for children who are sick and who should stay home also with continued use of remote learning for students who are sick there should be less stress on those who want to achieve perfect attendance awards as well in short there is no longer a reason to allow sick children to expose others to illness any longer spreading any illness has consequences beyond that of mere inconvenience as we approach return for on-site learning please let us learn from the past year i also feel it is crucial to require mask of all grades all grade schools and the middle school as well as a high school if there are any questions of vaccination status thank you for your time barb gerk and apparently i think i have one more hello first i want to thank all of you for allowing guidelines and putting our staff and students health and safety at the forefront for the last year and a half even when it wasn't always the most popular choice secondly i want to thank our dedicated staff again for working so hard and tirelessly in what has proven to be one of the hardest school years ever i am so proud that my children are students of cm 201u as a parent i send my students to school each day and put my trust in the teachers and admin to take care of my children and to keep them safe with covid19 this trust is only highlighted even more we are all eager to send our kids back to school they miss it so much all i ask is that this district please enforce mask wearing until this vaccine is available to our elementary children yes i know those grade schools are hot i know it's not comfortable to wear a mask all day however our children have given up 16 months of their lives to protect the most vulnerable they have sacrificed so much to keep help keep everyone safe now our children are the most vulnerable they do not have the privilege to receive a vaccine yet so now it is our responsibility to protect them the most vulnerable we as a family as a community and as a district have worked so hard to keep everyone safe please do not let kovid fatigue change that it would be a real shame for all the all this sacrifice to be for nothing if kids got sick because we weren't wearing mask protect them now thank you jamie healey thank you mr sawalis i unfortunately have a blinking light above me and i have old eyes so thank you for doing those good evening i want to thank you in advance for putting the safety of students and staff first as the schools resume operation at full capacity this school year i was pleased to see that the district plans to proceed with caution as we pack our classrooms again and require masks inside the buildings particularly for our non-air-conditioned i'm non-vaccinated young people thank you with that said i do have concerns for those in non-air-conditioned buildings having worked in the district for over 10 years and in three buildings with and without air conditioning i can attest to the extreme inequity of working and learning conditions this has been an ongoing issue that is only magnified by our current circumstances when the need for masks eventually subsides the extreme heat will continue to be a safety concern for those in non-air conditioned buildings i hope that the district and community will recognize the urgency of this and make it a priority sooner than later thank you melissa huff school social worker moani elementary thank you everybody so i want to thank everybody in the audience that's spoken that came tonight and i want to thank the board members for reading all that you see we have a lot of public comment on this topic and a lot of things to consider so right now i need a motion to close the public hearing and return to in-person learning and continuity of services public hearing sr-3 so moved one second all right so moved by sawalish seconded by walters and roll call please brownies and i mr swalish aye mrs walters aye mrs galbraith hi vice president ruth aye motion carries terry do we have any other public comment in general okay thank you so i'm going to turn it over to dr kara for administrative updates oh it's not okay good evening board members staff and our community this evening i would like to continue our conversation with a little bit more depth of some of the decisions that were made some of the plans to move forward and more specifically how to address some of the concerns that were brought up this evening [Music] and i'm going to have to use my glasses here since i can't see in looking at our reopening plan there's quite a bit more depth that we wanted to share this evening in looking at our district prevention strategies our main concern obviously is to make sure that we are having all of our students return to a very safe environment they have been away from us for quite a long time and we want to make sure that they are coming back safe so that they can learn and enjoy the environment of the classrooms in order to do that we have the responsibility to make sure again that it is safe and these are some of the guidelines this evening that we'll be talking about in the purple box on the left we want we made sure that we provided opportunities for vaccinations for those that were eligible consistent and correct mask use physical distancing screening and testing ventilation hand washing and hygiene staying home when sick and getting tested and the discussion of streamed instruction for those only that would be in quarantine and cleaning and disconfect disinfecting next slide so why would schools need continued prevention strategies certainly we're not out of the woods yet with a variant that is coming we are very cognizant and want to make sure that our environment continues to be vigilant and stay safe so we want to make sure that we safely reopen in-person instruction children can still get sick from covet and certainly they may not be sick but they can certainly pass it along to family members and not all students are eligible for the vaccinations especially our younger ones mask use that seems to be a topic of interest the district is supporting the use of mask use and it is required for all cm201u students staff until further notice and that supports our board policy outdoors in general students do not need to wear masks and during school transportation passengers and drivers must wear a mask on school buses heat mitigation that is certainly an area that we are concerned about as well we do have several of our elementary buildings and mec that is not air-conditioned so we have been working to explore a variety of mitigation plans as well as some strategies to utilize in the event of excessive heat in each of our classrooms air purifiers have been placed in all the classrooms they were there last year and they are going to maintain being in there this year we are ordering additional fans in each of the buildings for the hallways as well as an additional in those classrooms we have create created rotating math schedules to allow students an opportunity for frequent snack breaks drink breaks going outside to get the fresh air excessive heat days and i think this is what we are focused on in utilizing the guidelines that we've been given we can utilize e-learning days we have five e-learning days that we can utilize on days specifically for those buildings that get excessively hot and we can call those and we can have those e-learning days after those five days are exhausted we can move into emergency days we have five of those that are available and those are built into the calendar schedules at the beginning of the year now after that they are called act of god days those do not need to be made up and there is an indefinite number that can be taken so we do have three backup plans if we needed to move students back for remote for those e-learning days that are available and also could be altered schedules that might be 300 minutes might be coming just for the morning and dismissing that depends on transportation schedule so these are a variety of strategies that we can use in going into the year to help mitigate some of those buildings with heat the next slide really talks about again our priorities and that is to take a look at the guidelines that we have to keep our students safe as referenced tonight we have heard often the cdc has made recommendations for schools to make up those determinations but what they have said is that we need to be able to maintain three feet of social distancing in order to do that in taking a look at our buildings we cannot our buildings our classrooms are set up in a fashion that we cannot maintain that and so that would increase the risk of spread for cover 19.
elementary children age 12 and under are unable to be vaccinated at this time the low percentage of vaccinated at students at cmhs through our clinics was we had only about 184 students that were vaccinated that's a very low number of students and then more recently that was also referenced this evening the american academy of pediatrics recommends universal masking in schools for everyone ages 2 and above so these are some of the variables that we were looking at to determine mask or no masks and moving into this next year and again we are starting off the school year with these guidelines but we will be monitoring what's going on with the statistics and we will readjust and modify the guidelines um as needed the next area talks about the outbreak testing and i think this gets to what we've heard this evening about quarantining and what does that look like with streaming so in the event that there are students that contract covet or in exposed to that we work with our school nurse nurse kate to identify students at risk those students are then determined if they've had been vaccinated or if they've not been vaccinated we also determine if they have symptoms or no symptoms but the next piece we want to maybe emphasize a little bit more we are going to be asking that if student if parents would like to give their consent to have their child tested they do not need to be quarantined we would provide on-site testing for four weeks two times a week the guidelines state that they are trying to then monitor and they can catch students before it would erupt into ex further exposure so again the more that we have parent consent helping to help screen our students the more limited exposure for having students go into quarantine because we do not want our students quarantined they've been home long enough we want to keep them in the classrooms so students that would be tested would go be sent back into the classrooms and they would maintain regular instruction so we believe that there will probably very few students that would be quarantined throughout the year parental consent is required for students to be tested in an emergency outbreak now emergency outbreak would be a cluster of students of at least two or more in a particular area a classroom on a bus and then once that outbreak is considered nurse kate works with the idph cdc to take a look at our protocols and then the contact tracing is is put together students with proof of vaccination are not required to be tested and may continue to be included with in-person instruction if no symptoms are present if parents do not consent for testing or prove vaccination then they're the children that would be quarantined and that would be for 14 calendar days or two weeks during the week two weeks of school only students who don't do not have a parent consent form to test will participate in the quarantine google livestream access on and the academic learning lab will provide for these students so as we mentioned earlier live streaming is a little different than what we had earlier with the co with the hybrid because we knew that was difficult the live stream is turning on the live stream access for student to be an observer but not necessarily a participant and we have been working to put together an academic learning lab that would address students questions after school and that teacher or the instructional person that's working with those students would be working with homework and addressing those questions at that time so we are still working out several of these pieces right now the parent consent form will be available on skyward family access so we encourage all of our families to go on there it's going to be open beginning august 1st and the forms will be due by september 3rd so we are really looking at providing several strategies for making sure that we can keep our students in school next slide physical distancing in school the district will continue to implement physical distancing to the extent possible we have all of our students coming back it was a little easier we only had half of our students here but all of them will be coming back so we will encourage it as much as possible when feasible classrooms will maintain at least three feet when they're not teachers will layer multiple prevention strategies we will continue with cleaning and disinfecting once a day to remove potential viruses that may be on surfaces and we will continue our hand washing and hygiene protocols the district will continue to monitor and reinforce behaviors such as covering up for coughs and sneeze use adequate hand washing and antibacterial supplies limiting touching of hands mouth eyes and others providing community opportunities for vaccination the district offered several opportunities we had a total of 184 students and families were vaccinated at the district vaccination clinic this summer at cretemoney high school the cdc recommends that every one ages 12 and older get fully vaccinated against cova 19.